8 ms·

I thought his posts on how many batteries we'd need to convert to electric everything while maintaining living standards were very interesting.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
Is it this one? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/
- jeffreyrogers 4y ago
  Yep, that's what I was thinking of. (I think he has a couple of other posts along the same lines).
  - atlasunshrugged 4y ago
    Interesting article, thanks! Yeah, the move to electrify everything will have absolutely tremendous resource impacts-- I have been doing quite a bit of critical mineral policy work in the last ~6 months in the U.S. and the mining co's I talk to are all saying that the world needs to wake up and quick to just how many minerals need to be pulled out of the ground and that it'll take a whole of world collaboration to do it. Right now wealthy countries seem to prefer to let extraction happen in the developing world and processing in China because it's dirty and environmentally fraught, but something will break sooner or later because the demand is just astronomical. Maybe new mixtures will catch on (e.g. more high-end car manufacturers moving to LFP because of issues with the cobalt supply chain despite lower performance) but there's still going to be a lot of rocks that need to be dug out of the ground (or from space but no legacy mining co I've talked to believes that's realistic).
reactjavascript 4y ago
The standards have to change, and they may be “less” by some measures, but many people can still have a wonderful existence. Maybe you have to eat more vegetables and less cheeseburgers. Maybe you can’t drive your Suburban seven days a week to Starbucks. Maybe life will slow down and people will enjoy a higher quality of life with family and friends.
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  Maybe we upload our consciousness to computers and live in a simulated world that takes far less energy than our current one and is heaven for everybody. But I think the bigger question is less for whom? Right now it seems like it'll disproportionately affect the poor in the developing world who are least able to transition and whose populations are least responsible for climate impacts from historical growth. I wouldn't mind personally driving less (actually, haven't owned a car in a decade and walk most places), but I think in the end the people who will be punished are the poor who will have higher AC prices during summers, gas prices to go to work, etc.
epistasis 4y ago
That post makes me distrust all the rest of his analysis. This conclusion in particular: > Rather, the lesson is that we must work within serious constraints to meet future demands. Within just a few years, his spherical cow estimates of needs have been proven to not be very useful for scoping the problem. And his proposed solution of nuclear has proven to be infeasible and too expensive. So what pretends to be an unbiased assessment based on physical principles is revealed to actually be a huge number of assumptions that are not reflective of reality, or useful for thinking about the future. This is the exact problem that the original post talks about. We are too easily fooled by models that are simple, and wrong, like what dothemath presents.
- scythe 4y ago
  You're not alone. That article was the reason I stopped considering him a reasonable source. >I’ll use lead-acid batteries as a baseline. Why? Because lead-acid batteries are the cheapest way to store electricity today. That wasn't even true when the article was written. Pumped hydro has always been cheaper than batteries, and unless we've made some big improvements since I last checked the news, it still is. >And lead is a common element, being the endpoint of the alpha-decay chain of heavy elements like uranium and thorium. What's really incredible is that a physicist would make this argument. Lead is not common, and anyone with even a superficial familiarity with the process of stellar nucleosynthesis can easily explain why. A zinc nucleus needs to capture around 150 neutrons to produce a lead nucleus. All heavy elements are rare on a cosmic scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#/media/File:Elements_abundance-bars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... But the other glaring hole in the analysis is the lack of reference to prior work. Japan had already developed a grid energy storage system based on sodium-sulfur batteries in the 1980s [1]. I would expect a serious analysis to consider the existing state of the art. These mistakes don't strike me as arising from a lack of competence, but rather from a desire to inflate the apparent strength of the conclusions. 1: https://ceramics.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-7402.2004.tb00179.x https://ceramics.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1...
  - g_sch 4y ago

atlasunshrugged 4y ago

Is it this one? https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/08/nation-sized-battery/

jeffreyrogers 4y ago
Yep, that's what I was thinking of. (I think he has a couple of other posts along the same lines).
- atlasunshrugged 4y ago
  Interesting article, thanks! Yeah, the move to electrify everything will have absolutely tremendous resource impacts-- I have been doing quite a bit of critical mineral policy work in the last ~6 months in the U.S. and the mining co's I talk to are all saying that the world needs to wake up and quick to just how many minerals need to be pulled out of the ground and that it'll take a whole of world collaboration to do it. Right now wealthy countries seem to prefer to let extraction happen in the developing world and processing in China because it's dirty and environmentally fraught, but something will break sooner or later because the demand is just astronomical. Maybe new mixtures will catch on (e.g. more high-end car manufacturers moving to LFP because of issues with the cobalt supply chain despite lower performance) but there's still going to be a lot of rocks that need to be dug out of the ground (or from space but no legacy mining co I've talked to believes that's realistic).

reactjavascript 4y ago

The standards have to change, and they may be “less” by some measures, but many people can still have a wonderful existence. Maybe you have to eat more vegetables and less cheeseburgers. Maybe you can’t drive your Suburban seven days a week to Starbucks. Maybe life will slow down and people will enjoy a higher quality of life with family and friends.

atlasunshrugged 4y ago
Maybe we upload our consciousness to computers and live in a simulated world that takes far less energy than our current one and is heaven for everybody. But I think the bigger question is less for whom? Right now it seems like it'll disproportionately affect the poor in the developing world who are least able to transition and whose populations are least responsible for climate impacts from historical growth. I wouldn't mind personally driving less (actually, haven't owned a car in a decade and walk most places), but I think in the end the people who will be punished are the poor who will have higher AC prices during summers, gas prices to go to work, etc.

epistasis 4y ago

That post makes me distrust all the rest of his analysis. This conclusion in particular: > Rather, the lesson is that we must work within serious constraints to meet future demands. Within just a few years, his spherical cow estimates of needs have been proven to not be very useful for scoping the problem. And his proposed solution of nuclear has proven to be infeasible and too expensive. So what pretends to be an unbiased assessment based on physical principles is revealed to actually be a huge number of assumptions that are not reflective of reality, or useful for thinking about the future. This is the exact problem that the original post talks about. We are too easily fooled by models that are simple, and wrong, like what dothemath presents.

scythe 4y ago
You're not alone. That article was the reason I stopped considering him a reasonable source. >I’ll use lead-acid batteries as a baseline. Why? Because lead-acid batteries are the cheapest way to store electricity today. That wasn't even true when the article was written. Pumped hydro has always been cheaper than batteries, and unless we've made some big improvements since I last checked the news, it still is. >And lead is a common element, being the endpoint of the alpha-decay chain of heavy elements like uranium and thorium. What's really incredible is that a physicist would make this argument. Lead is not common, and anyone with even a superficial familiarity with the process of stellar nucleosynthesis can easily explain why. A zinc nucleus needs to capture around 150 neutrons to produce a lead nucleus. All heavy elements are rare on a cosmic scale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#/media/File:Elements_abundance-bars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... But the other glaring hole in the analysis is the lack of reference to prior work. Japan had already developed a grid energy storage system based on sodium-sulfur batteries in the 1980s [1]. I would expect a serious analysis to consider the existing state of the art. These mistakes don't strike me as arising from a lack of competence, but rather from a desire to inflate the apparent strength of the conclusions. 1: https://ceramics.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1744-7402.2004.tb00179.x https://ceramics.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1...
- g_sch 4y ago