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Here's what I'm looking forward to: a world where energy<>pollution. This whole period where energy production as our greatest environmental problem has promot

Here's what I'm looking forward to: a world where energy<>pollution. This whole period where energy production as our greatest environmental problem has promoted the wrong type of thinking. It's Energy austerity, the need to take steps back, slow or reverse progress. Since technology, industry and energy are so closely coupled, this has almost made futuristic thinking politically incorrect, or at least unpalatable. I want to get back to a future that's futuristic, where we can build 100X bigger, desalinate sweetwater rivers, have floating stuff all around us.... Basically, I want to get back to the old curve, where we make more energy every year and that's a good thing.

roryisok 8y ago
The amount of energy sent our way from the sun every day is more than enough (I half recall a fact that one day of sunshine has the same energy as all the fossil fuels left on earth, someone correct me). I think with solar getting cheaper all the time the challenge is going to become storing energy cleanly and distributing it efficiently.
- trothamel 8y ago
  Okay, in December 2017, the US produced 345,939 GWH of electricity, of which 1,476 was solar. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly//epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly//epm_table_grapher.p... If you look at the best spots in the US in December, they seem to get about 4,500 watt hours per square meter per day. https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/general-solar-information/solar-insolation-maps.html https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/general-solar... So that means we'd need 76,875 square kilometers of solar to match the current generation of the US, not counting losses from storage. That's between the size of South Carolina, and West Virginia, just coated with solar panels.
  - neolefty 8y ago
    Or 70% of Nevada. I for one welcome our paving-the-deserts-with-solar-panels robot overlords.
    - cfadvan 8y ago
      It doesn’t help to capture all of that energy if we can’t store and transmit it efficiently.
      - neolefty 8y ago
        For sure! And I think that a massive increase of storage will make transmission much easier, by allowing us to time-shift transmission—at the expense of efficiency. 1. generate solar power during the day in Nevada and store it nearby 2. trickle it cross-country at night—when the grid is under-utilized—to distributed storage facilities, where demand will be higher the next day 3. use it the next day, or store and forward again That way, long-distance transmission won't need the same massive upgrades—high-temp superconductors! megatons of copper! 7-figure transformers!—as if we had to use the solar power right away.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Yes, that's huge. The big numbers can look overwhelming. Huge land-use changes that we've already made would look overwhelming if considered as a single monolithic project. Solar facility construction isn't going to be a single monolithic project any more than the existing American biofuel or fossil fuel systems were. http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/04/corn-consumption-and-acreage.html http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/04/corn-consumption-an... 2016 numbers: about 93.6 million acres planted for corn. About 5.2 billion bushels out of 14.4 billion bushels of corn yield went to corn ethanol. If harvest and land area are proportionate, that's about 33.7 million acres dedicated to corn ethanol [1]. 33.7 million acres is about 136,000 km^2. The areal energy yield from biofuels is paltry compared to what you can get from solar PV. Manufacturing/installing solar PV is more resource-intense than planting corn. But it's low-maintenance once installed. It doesn't require arable land, weeding, irrigation, fertilizer, or harvesting. [1] Yes, the residual material left after fermentation is also used as animal feed. But the conversion efficiency is low; you're not adding many calories per acre to the human food supply when corn is fermented and leftovers go to cattle.
  - glenstein 8y ago
    The good thing about solar is it need not occupy new land. It can be installed on land already "occupied" by buildings. According to NREL, there's enough existing roof space for 1,432 terawatt-hours of annual energy generation from solar, which would be 38.6% of our annual generation. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf
spodek 8y ago
1. If only energy were the only problem. Extinctions, resource depletion, overcrowding, etc. I like futuristic technologies. I also like kids playing on grass, not astroturf, however space-age. 2. Consuming less doesn't require austere or lower standard of living. Most Americans can reduce their energy and other consumption probably by 75% and improve their standards of living. My standard of living has improved since acting to consume less and I'm not special.
- jpadkins 8y ago
  can you write a guide on how to improve your standard of living while reducing consumption? I would think that reducing consumption while maintaining standard of living would have high initial capital costs..
  - floatrock 8y ago
    I would have used quality of life, not standard of living. There are material solutions that have high initial capital costs, but there's also a ton of behavioral or lifestyle changes you can make. One of the biggest is meat consumption. A calorie of meat has something like 10x the energy embedded it in as a calorie of vegetables. I'm not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination -- I just love ribs too much -- but I have significantly cut the amount of meat I consume to a few times a week. Helps you get more creative with cooking, opens up new tastes, and frankly, costs less. Transportation is the other big one. I've started biking for my commute and it makes me feel great... I've lost weight and my commute just feels better than being stuck in a car or bus every day. That one could arguably be a lower standard of living (if you measure standard of living by the comfiness of your car) but in my opinion, definitely a higher quality of life (I'd rather be moving than stuck in traffic or crammed into a standingroom-only bus).
    - jpadkins 8y ago
      Thanks. Those are both good examples. And I agree quality of life is better metric than standard of living.
    - 8y ago
nickik 8y ago
Non of this thinking is even futuristic. It was futuristic in 50s. Look at France. They solved this problems in the 70/80 with technology from the 50/60. The problem is utter stupidity of both the population and politics. There is absolutely no problem. Nuclear energy is utterly inexhaustible for the next 1000 years, it uses almost no resources (in terms of land, steel, water) it causes absolutely no pollution at all. https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=FR https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem... Why not copy what clearly works? Why does everybody invent something new when we invented something 70 years ago. We would finally have the energy to do things like desalinate sweetwater and synthetic fuels.
- cfadvan 8y ago
  I’m very very pro nuclear, but you’re sort of bullshitting here. No pollution? Most people would consider nuclear waste to be polluting, and nothing is perfect, sometimes you get a Fukushima. It also pollutes down the line when you’remining Uranium and processing fuel, and for now even with perfect safety that’s unavoidable. It’s still a much better choice than anything else, and it pollutes less, and modern designs can be very safe. We’d actually be safer, since we could replace older, unsafe designs with modern ones. We still need a political solution to the waste problem though, and I have no idea how that can be done.
  - nickik 8y ago
    > Most people would consider nuclear waste to be polluting Then 'most people' don't know what pollution means. Nuclear 'waste' is a controlled output of a process that can and is controlled to not effect the environment in any way. In terms of nuclear arguing what 'most people' believe is utterly pointless because 'most people' don't understand even the basics of nuclear physics. > and nothing is perfect, sometimes you get a Fukushima Nothing is perfect. But somehow people don't point to all the deaths that happen on solar installations and so on. The fact is that nuclear is the safest form of energy.
    - cfadvan 8y ago

roryisok 8y ago

The amount of energy sent our way from the sun every day is more than enough (I half recall a fact that one day of sunshine has the same energy as all the fossil fuels left on earth, someone correct me). I think with solar getting cheaper all the time the challenge is going to become storing energy cleanly and distributing it efficiently.

trothamel 8y ago
Okay, in December 2017, the US produced 345,939 GWH of electricity, of which 1,476 was solar. https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly//epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_1_01 https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly//epm_table_grapher.p... If you look at the best spots in the US in December, they seem to get about 4,500 watt hours per square meter per day. https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/general-solar-information/solar-insolation-maps.html https://www.solar-electric.com/learning-center/general-solar... So that means we'd need 76,875 square kilometers of solar to match the current generation of the US, not counting losses from storage. That's between the size of South Carolina, and West Virginia, just coated with solar panels.
- neolefty 8y ago
  Or 70% of Nevada. I for one welcome our paving-the-deserts-with-solar-panels robot overlords.
  - cfadvan 8y ago
    It doesn’t help to capture all of that energy if we can’t store and transmit it efficiently.
    - neolefty 8y ago
      For sure! And I think that a massive increase of storage will make transmission much easier, by allowing us to time-shift transmission—at the expense of efficiency. 1. generate solar power during the day in Nevada and store it nearby 2. trickle it cross-country at night—when the grid is under-utilized—to distributed storage facilities, where demand will be higher the next day 3. use it the next day, or store and forward again That way, long-distance transmission won't need the same massive upgrades—high-temp superconductors! megatons of copper! 7-figure transformers!—as if we had to use the solar power right away.
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Yes, that's huge. The big numbers can look overwhelming. Huge land-use changes that we've already made would look overwhelming if considered as a single monolithic project. Solar facility construction isn't going to be a single monolithic project any more than the existing American biofuel or fossil fuel systems were. http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/04/corn-consumption-and-acreage.html http://farmdocdaily.illinois.edu/2016/04/corn-consumption-an... 2016 numbers: about 93.6 million acres planted for corn. About 5.2 billion bushels out of 14.4 billion bushels of corn yield went to corn ethanol. If harvest and land area are proportionate, that's about 33.7 million acres dedicated to corn ethanol [1]. 33.7 million acres is about 136,000 km^2. The areal energy yield from biofuels is paltry compared to what you can get from solar PV. Manufacturing/installing solar PV is more resource-intense than planting corn. But it's low-maintenance once installed. It doesn't require arable land, weeding, irrigation, fertilizer, or harvesting. [1] Yes, the residual material left after fermentation is also used as animal feed. But the conversion efficiency is low; you're not adding many calories per acre to the human food supply when corn is fermented and leftovers go to cattle.
- glenstein 8y ago
  The good thing about solar is it need not occupy new land. It can be installed on land already "occupied" by buildings. According to NREL, there's enough existing roof space for 1,432 terawatt-hours of annual energy generation from solar, which would be 38.6% of our annual generation. https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy16osti/65298.pdf

spodek 8y ago

1. If only energy were the only problem. Extinctions, resource depletion, overcrowding, etc. I like futuristic technologies. I also like kids playing on grass, not astroturf, however space-age. 2. Consuming less doesn't require austere or lower standard of living. Most Americans can reduce their energy and other consumption probably by 75% and improve their standards of living. My standard of living has improved since acting to consume less and I'm not special.

jpadkins 8y ago
can you write a guide on how to improve your standard of living while reducing consumption? I would think that reducing consumption while maintaining standard of living would have high initial capital costs..
- floatrock 8y ago
  I would have used quality of life, not standard of living. There are material solutions that have high initial capital costs, but there's also a ton of behavioral or lifestyle changes you can make. One of the biggest is meat consumption. A calorie of meat has something like 10x the energy embedded it in as a calorie of vegetables. I'm not a vegetarian by any stretch of the imagination -- I just love ribs too much -- but I have significantly cut the amount of meat I consume to a few times a week. Helps you get more creative with cooking, opens up new tastes, and frankly, costs less. Transportation is the other big one. I've started biking for my commute and it makes me feel great... I've lost weight and my commute just feels better than being stuck in a car or bus every day. That one could arguably be a lower standard of living (if you measure standard of living by the comfiness of your car) but in my opinion, definitely a higher quality of life (I'd rather be moving than stuck in traffic or crammed into a standingroom-only bus).
  - jpadkins 8y ago
    Thanks. Those are both good examples. And I agree quality of life is better metric than standard of living.
  - 8y ago

nickik 8y ago

Non of this thinking is even futuristic. It was futuristic in 50s. Look at France. They solved this problems in the 70/80 with technology from the 50/60. The problem is utter stupidity of both the population and politics. There is absolutely no problem. Nuclear energy is utterly inexhaustible for the next 1000 years, it uses almost no resources (in terms of land, steel, water) it causes absolutely no pollution at all. https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&remote=true&wind=false&countryCode=FR https://www.electricitymap.org/?page=country&solar=false&rem... Why not copy what clearly works? Why does everybody invent something new when we invented something 70 years ago. We would finally have the energy to do things like desalinate sweetwater and synthetic fuels.

cfadvan 8y ago
I’m very very pro nuclear, but you’re sort of bullshitting here. No pollution? Most people would consider nuclear waste to be polluting, and nothing is perfect, sometimes you get a Fukushima. It also pollutes down the line when you’remining Uranium and processing fuel, and for now even with perfect safety that’s unavoidable. It’s still a much better choice than anything else, and it pollutes less, and modern designs can be very safe. We’d actually be safer, since we could replace older, unsafe designs with modern ones. We still need a political solution to the waste problem though, and I have no idea how that can be done.
- nickik 8y ago
  > Most people would consider nuclear waste to be polluting Then 'most people' don't know what pollution means. Nuclear 'waste' is a controlled output of a process that can and is controlled to not effect the environment in any way. In terms of nuclear arguing what 'most people' believe is utterly pointless because 'most people' don't understand even the basics of nuclear physics. > and nothing is perfect, sometimes you get a Fukushima Nothing is perfect. But somehow people don't point to all the deaths that happen on solar installations and so on. The fact is that nuclear is the safest form of energy.
  - cfadvan 8y ago