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I tend to agree. What if solar plus batteries are actually another one of those black swans but one with a (very) slow fuse rather than a big bang breakthrough

by mtgx 8y ago

I tend to agree. What if solar plus batteries are actually another one of those black swans but one with a (very) slow fuse rather than a big bang breakthrough?!

candiodari 8y ago
Solar plus batteries comes with 1) massive investment (at the moment at least) 2) enormous physical footprint, which needs to be solved either through reserving large amounts of space for it, or by having a large transmission grid and all the services required around that 3) lots of greenhouse emissions to produce 1 and 2 in the first place
- epistasis 8y ago
  Neither of these are difficult to deal with. For battery costs, I posted this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18808842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18808842 Batteries are dropping in cost far faster than nearly anybody realizes, and people seem to think we're paying 8088 costs when we're up to pentium costs for computing. Space concerns are pretty minor, it really doesn't take much compared to current human land use. In addition to covering land that's already used by humans for parking or building, we will likely see more farm land that's currently producing things like soybeans or field corn converted to solar farms, and solar is more environmentally friendly to those ecosystems than the current farming practice. Neither of these have significant greenhouse emissions, and as the energy supply chain lessens its carbon use so will all the manufacturing and recycling.
  - candiodari 8y ago
    > Space concerns are pretty minor, it really doesn't take much compared to current human land use. Well, sure. But in absolute terms that's still a pretty large space which we can't just allocate near every city. By contrast, current power plants are the size of a large apartment block, which we can allocate, even inside the cities. And if we build that solar infrastructure away from cities where land is available and cheap, then we need to connect it and we need to build the grid to support that, which also isn't cheap, and has other problems.
    - pfdietz 8y ago
      We can judge the importance of space concerns by cost. What fraction of solar/battery installs is the cost of land? Answer: it's pretty small in most of the world. In particular, land in desert regions is almost free.

by mtgx 8y ago

I tend to agree. What if solar plus batteries are actually another one of those black swans but one with a (very) slow fuse rather than a big bang breakthrough?!

candiodari 8y ago

Solar plus batteries comes with 1) massive investment (at the moment at least) 2) enormous physical footprint, which needs to be solved either through reserving large amounts of space for it, or by having a large transmission grid and all the services required around that 3) lots of greenhouse emissions to produce 1 and 2 in the first place

epistasis 8y ago
Neither of these are difficult to deal with. For battery costs, I posted this recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18808842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18808842 Batteries are dropping in cost far faster than nearly anybody realizes, and people seem to think we're paying 8088 costs when we're up to pentium costs for computing. Space concerns are pretty minor, it really doesn't take much compared to current human land use. In addition to covering land that's already used by humans for parking or building, we will likely see more farm land that's currently producing things like soybeans or field corn converted to solar farms, and solar is more environmentally friendly to those ecosystems than the current farming practice. Neither of these have significant greenhouse emissions, and as the energy supply chain lessens its carbon use so will all the manufacturing and recycling.
- candiodari 8y ago
  > Space concerns are pretty minor, it really doesn't take much compared to current human land use. Well, sure. But in absolute terms that's still a pretty large space which we can't just allocate near every city. By contrast, current power plants are the size of a large apartment block, which we can allocate, even inside the cities. And if we build that solar infrastructure away from cities where land is available and cheap, then we need to connect it and we need to build the grid to support that, which also isn't cheap, and has other problems.
  - pfdietz 8y ago
    We can judge the importance of space concerns by cost. What fraction of solar/battery installs is the cost of land? Answer: it's pretty small in most of the world. In particular, land in desert regions is almost free.