5 ms·

As opposed to fossil fuels, famously free of geopolitical nightmares.

kkfx 4y ago
You can store oil. In significant quantity. You can't store electricity in the same way, easiness and quantity. So in case of a war you still have, any country still have months of oil reserves, very little electricity reserves in the form of pumped hydro, fossils and nuclear powers. Not only: a electricity grid disruption is almost instantaneous, oil&gas issue takes at least days and can be foreseeable in months and years. At a small scale: you can easily store in your garage 1000l, 2000l of diesel. You only need two cheap plastic reservoirs with a supporting structure (something here in EU south priced 50-200€ per tank) and or a high enough support (gravity fall) or a manual/electric pump (various price but in the range of 200-500€ more maximum) and your car will be autonomous for a certain, not that small, amount of time. Similarly to heat your house you might have perhaps 5-15.000l tank underground in your garden, normally sufficient for an year of heating. You can also easy store hot water, it does not last that long but two day is doable. You might have wood burning backups etc. Electricity? Try just to compare the impact of a 5 day gas station strike vs a 5 day blackouts for yourself. My personal lithium storage suffice for a night at minimum service (just lights, fridges/freezers, home rack etc NO heating/cooling without Sun) and its price was ~4k€ (battery) + 2k€ (battery inverter) for an estimated maximum service life of 10 years. While diesel reservoirs and pumps can potentially last 100+ years. Surely the Sun tend to shine a bit all day, but just to live on it I need at my single-home scale the price of a mid-range car for a similar MTBF. With a very cheap and resilient solution I can survive few months without diesel supply. With relatively cheap freezers I can survive a month or two grocery supply without special attentions. Without water things get complicated, but I still have a bit of autonomy anyway. Without electricity I have a small autonomy thanks to p.v. + lithium but while all the rest it's doable by anyone the p.v. system is too expensive for most and still not suffice to heat the house in winter. In summer I can cool it during the day and lucky here nights are always fresh, but you get the idea. At a bigger scale I do not have sources is English, this is a study by French Gov. https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services/cge/stockage_electricite.pdf https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services... on the topic, it's conclusion are: we can't run France on renewable nor now nor in the foreseeable future. And that's a study by public body only, no interested parts for nor fossil nor renewables sectors...
- SlickNixon 4y ago
  >You can store oil. In significant quantity. >Did you consider how strategical targets became such networks? All your numbers and calculations are background noise when you can't keep your fundamental concerns coherent. Edit: Let me say that I see where you're coming from--I get the concern about large, low inertia systems, the ww2 partisans, the need for self reliance. But that ship has sailed. Russia is currently beating the bricks off Germany with the Nordstream. Saudi Arabia has been 'a murdering and 'a terrorizing for the better part of a century on the basis of their petroleum reserves. I buy that renewables won't pay for the whole party, but it's also undeniable that renewables, in their various and sundry forms, are much more evenly distributed (globally, if not locally) and are therefore much less prone to the kind of exploitative power structures that have already arrived. All other economic considerations aside.
  - kkfx 4y ago
    That's an interesting point: yes, formally renewable are significantly "distributed" geographically, the tech to use them though is not that much and the trade-off between the two (control over localized natural sources vs control over tech needed to exploit distributed sources) could be an interesting scenario. In that sense I see a far more nightmarish scenario where the progress is not anymore done in public universities but in private companies to a point that civil society can just only get black boxes from them, but that's is a bit OT here. What's in-topic is that few sources state we are near to 100% renewable option, and some other say absolutely not, with the truth probably lie in the difference between theory and practice + availability of something vs it's adoption on scale. If that it's true IMVHO we will not be able to run on renewable for at least 50+ years AND we will suffer MANY issues trying to go faster...

kkfx 4y ago

You can store oil. In significant quantity. You can't store electricity in the same way, easiness and quantity. So in case of a war you still have, any country still have months of oil reserves, very little electricity reserves in the form of pumped hydro, fossils and nuclear powers. Not only: a electricity grid disruption is almost instantaneous, oil&gas issue takes at least days and can be foreseeable in months and years. At a small scale: you can easily store in your garage 1000l, 2000l of diesel. You only need two cheap plastic reservoirs with a supporting structure (something here in EU south priced 50-200€ per tank) and or a high enough support (gravity fall) or a manual/electric pump (various price but in the range of 200-500€ more maximum) and your car will be autonomous for a certain, not that small, amount of time. Similarly to heat your house you might have perhaps 5-15.000l tank underground in your garden, normally sufficient for an year of heating. You can also easy store hot water, it does not last that long but two day is doable. You might have wood burning backups etc. Electricity? Try just to compare the impact of a 5 day gas station strike vs a 5 day blackouts for yourself. My personal lithium storage suffice for a night at minimum service (just lights, fridges/freezers, home rack etc NO heating/cooling without Sun) and its price was ~4k€ (battery) + 2k€ (battery inverter) for an estimated maximum service life of 10 years. While diesel reservoirs and pumps can potentially last 100+ years. Surely the Sun tend to shine a bit all day, but just to live on it I need at my single-home scale the price of a mid-range car for a similar MTBF. With a very cheap and resilient solution I can survive few months without diesel supply. With relatively cheap freezers I can survive a month or two grocery supply without special attentions. Without water things get complicated, but I still have a bit of autonomy anyway. Without electricity I have a small autonomy thanks to p.v. + lithium but while all the rest it's doable by anyone the p.v. system is too expensive for most and still not suffice to heat the house in winter. In summer I can cool it during the day and lucky here nights are always fresh, but you get the idea. At a bigger scale I do not have sources is English, this is a study by French Gov. https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services/cge/stockage_electricite.pdf https://www.economie.gouv.fr/files/files/directions_services... on the topic, it's conclusion are: we can't run France on renewable nor now nor in the foreseeable future. And that's a study by public body only, no interested parts for nor fossil nor renewables sectors...

SlickNixon 4y ago
>You can store oil. In significant quantity. >Did you consider how strategical targets became such networks? All your numbers and calculations are background noise when you can't keep your fundamental concerns coherent. Edit: Let me say that I see where you're coming from--I get the concern about large, low inertia systems, the ww2 partisans, the need for self reliance. But that ship has sailed. Russia is currently beating the bricks off Germany with the Nordstream. Saudi Arabia has been 'a murdering and 'a terrorizing for the better part of a century on the basis of their petroleum reserves. I buy that renewables won't pay for the whole party, but it's also undeniable that renewables, in their various and sundry forms, are much more evenly distributed (globally, if not locally) and are therefore much less prone to the kind of exploitative power structures that have already arrived. All other economic considerations aside.
- kkfx 4y ago
  That's an interesting point: yes, formally renewable are significantly "distributed" geographically, the tech to use them though is not that much and the trade-off between the two (control over localized natural sources vs control over tech needed to exploit distributed sources) could be an interesting scenario. In that sense I see a far more nightmarish scenario where the progress is not anymore done in public universities but in private companies to a point that civil society can just only get black boxes from them, but that's is a bit OT here. What's in-topic is that few sources state we are near to 100% renewable option, and some other say absolutely not, with the truth probably lie in the difference between theory and practice + availability of something vs it's adoption on scale. If that it's true IMVHO we will not be able to run on renewable for at least 50+ years AND we will suffer MANY issues trying to go faster...