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> It's irrelevant because noone is suggesting creating or destroying energy. I have a feeling you might not fully grasp this. A simple way to explain this law

> It's irrelevant because noone is suggesting creating or destroying energy. I have a feeling you might not fully grasp this. A simple way to explain this law is the "no free lunch" idea. You can't get a free lunch. Someone, somewhere, somehow, has to pay for it. This means that if it took 1 unit of energy to go from point A to point B, returning to point A isn't going to magically happen with less energy. Energy isn't ever created or destroyed, it is transformed. Always. In a real system, nothing is 100% efficient. Which means some of that energy will be converted (transformed) into some other form of energy. More often than not we end up heat. And, in a really inefficient system (which is what we are talking about with all of these so-called solutions) the amount of waste energy is just massive. And that's the issue. You can't get a free lunch. You don't get to add a bunch of CO2 to the atmosphere using x units of energy and remove using x/2 units, it's more like x * 10 or x * 100. If someone claims they can fix this with less energy that went into creating the problem in the first place, they are violating conservation of energy because they would have to CREATE massive amounts of energy in order to achieve that. And you cannot do that. If I claimed I could capture enough CO2 from the atmosphere in one hour with the energy provided by a car battery everyone would laugh at me. People intuitively understand you need much more than that, both time and energy. And yet, what we are being told is not very different in scale to this ridiculous example. It takes about 100K years for the planet to bring down atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. We are talking about doing the same thing in 30 years and with, comparably speaking, an insignificant amount of energy and resources. No different from the obviously ridiculous car battery and one hour joke. > 60TW of solar (double the worldwide primary energy) is a 1000km square. Sure. And a cow is a uniform sphere of milk one meter in diameter. This is the problem with all this hand-wavy stuff. No amount of solar will EVER stop or reverse atmospheric CO2. Not now, not ever. It has nothing whatsoever to do with solar panel efficiency. It has to do with physics. And the physics says, no, you cannot do it. You could transition the entire world to the most optimal forms of renewable energies --forms we have yet to develop-- and it will do NOTHING to atmospheric CO2 concentration. In fact, it will continue to rise. The only force that can affect this is the planet itself. And it does that through a combination of time (tens of thousands of years) and weather (rain, hurricanes, cyclones, etc.). You don't have to believe me on this. We have known this since at least 2014. Here's the paper that opened my eyes. The researchers, admit going into this fully biased and with the intent to prove, as they put it, once and for all, that a full deployment of renewables was the solution. They ended-up discovering they were very wrong. Kudos for publishing it. These days that takes guts. The hatred out there any time one dares to question the cult this thing has become is absolutely incredible. Science and knowledge does not advance when hatred is what one gets back for daring to propose something might not be right. It's really sad. Truly. It's a perfect emperor-has-no-clothes type of scenario. Except, if you dare to speak up your life and career could be ruined by the rabid mobs. > Why not? Sunlight is free and abundant. That's a hand-wavy argument. You have to account for the reality of solar vs. the fantasy of it. Building my 13 kW array was an education in more ways than one. I do not regret building it at all. However, as an engineer, it made me understand just how much bullshit is being floated in this domain as well. A solar power plant that can match the output of a conventional power generation plant (the technology does not matter) has to be built with a capacity equal to at least 7 to 10 times the required steady-state power output. In simple terms: If you need a 1 GW power plant that can output 1 GW 24/7, you either build a 1 GW nuclear power plan or a 10 GW (or more) solar facility. That's what is required in order for the solar installation to deliver the same power 24/7. I have written about this before. I won't repeat all of it here. I can show the need for a 3x multiplier with less than high school math. Here's the output from my solar array on a good day: https://i.imgur.com/Fl8ARJd.png https://i.imgur.com/Fl8ARJd.png If we call that a parabola, the area under the curve (the integral) is 2/3 the area of the enclosing rectangle. The rectangle would represent the output of something like a nuclear or other steady form of power generation. In order to match the output of a steady power source, we have to build a solar array that is 1.5 times larger than this, and, of course, add a large amount of storage to be able to fill the dead zones. Simple physics and math. Impossible to dispute. And yet it doesn't end there. In simple terms, this only covers 12 hours of the day. Now you have to DOUBLE that system in order to be able to have enough energy to maintain that steady peak power output for 24 hours. We are now at a multiplier of 3. Here's another --more typical-- image from my solar array: https://i.imgur.com/SOr30bX.png https://i.imgur.com/SOr30bX.png What are those massive dips, lasting hours, that cut down output 25% to 50%? That's horrible. Clouds. Weather. Yup. As I said earlier...the reality of solar vs. the fantasy of solar. I've done the math. I won't bother with the details here. You very quickly approach having to build a system in the 10x range, or more. Look at this daily output chart, again, from my own system, to, again, understand reality: https://i.imgur.com/bGuCH2F.png https://i.imgur.com/bGuCH2F.png More panels, tons of batteries and, even with that, you have to overbuild and live with the issues. Your 60 TW system is, at best, a 6 TW system. And, when you take into account other factors, failures, maintenance and the 15 to 20 year lifetime of the massive number of panels, electronics, batteries, etc. required to make this go. Well, again, reality vs. fantasy. I don't have problem with solar. I invested in it and I would do it again. I simply prefer to talk about the reality of things rather than engage in self-defeating cult fantasies that serve no purpose at all. Solar will help. A lot. Yet, we need nuclear. I don't believe we can go much further without nuclear. We need to double our power generation and delivery capacity in order to transition to electric transportation. That is not going to happen with solar and wind. Nuclear is a must.

robomartin 4y ago
Didn't provide a link to the Google Research RE<C paper. Here it is: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... Well worth a careful read. This is the paper that shook me out of blindly accepting what I was being told. From there I decided I needed to know much more, at many levels, in order to understand. This led to about a year of work digging for root-cause understanding, identifying a baseline from which to compare solutions and, in general, being able to have a clear view of where we are and what we can and cannot achieve. We are being bombarded with false solutions, all of which are hand-wavy in nature, which is to say they do not provide an honest accounting of the energy, resource and materials they will require and pollution they will inject into the ecosystem. They all treat planetary scale projects as though they were miniature no-impact tasks. For example, digging up five billion tons of something, processing and delivering it all around the world never mentions energy requirements, resources (oil, fuel, chemicals, water, transportation, etc.), ecosystem damage and CO2 (and other pollutants) the process will contribute to the planet --at a planetary scale. Never. A few quotes from the paper: "Google’s boldest energy move was an effort known as RE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do." "In 2011, the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the initiative. The two of us, who worked as engineers on the internal RE<C projects, were then forced to reexamine our assumptions. " "we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change." "We now know that to be a false hope" "even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant today, existing CO2 will continue to warm the planet." "Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking" "if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability." "To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies." We need to focus on the physics-driven reality of the task and stop with the fantasies. Every single purported solution ought to come with a specifications document that lists requirements, inputs and outputs, at planetary scale. Time to a 100 ppm CO2 reduction at planetary scale. Energy. Materials. Resources. Fuel. Transportation. CO2 and other emissions. Environmental/ecological effects. Etc. A standard format could be developed. This should not take more than a single page. Something like this would make it brutally easy to separate the nonsense from things we might actually want to focus on.

robomartin 4y ago

Didn't provide a link to the Google Research RE<C paper. Here it is: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-data/pdf/43326.pdf https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... Well worth a careful read. This is the paper that shook me out of blindly accepting what I was being told. From there I decided I needed to know much more, at many levels, in order to understand. This led to about a year of work digging for root-cause understanding, identifying a baseline from which to compare solutions and, in general, being able to have a clear view of where we are and what we can and cannot achieve. We are being bombarded with false solutions, all of which are hand-wavy in nature, which is to say they do not provide an honest accounting of the energy, resource and materials they will require and pollution they will inject into the ecosystem. They all treat planetary scale projects as though they were miniature no-impact tasks. For example, digging up five billion tons of something, processing and delivering it all around the world never mentions energy requirements, resources (oil, fuel, chemicals, water, transportation, etc.), ecosystem damage and CO2 (and other pollutants) the process will contribute to the planet --at a planetary scale. Never. A few quotes from the paper: "Google’s boldest energy move was an effort known as RE<C, which aimed to develop renewable energy sources that would generate electricity more cheaply than coal-fired power plants do." "In 2011, the company decided that RE<C was not on track to meet its target and shut down the initiative. The two of us, who worked as engineers on the internal RE<C projects, were then forced to reexamine our assumptions. " "we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change." "We now know that to be a false hope" "even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant today, existing CO2 will continue to warm the planet." "Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking" "if all power plants and industrial facilities switch over to zero-carbon energy sources right now, we’ll still be left with a ruinous amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. It would take centuries for atmospheric levels to return to normal, which means centuries of warming and instability." "To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies." We need to focus on the physics-driven reality of the task and stop with the fantasies. Every single purported solution ought to come with a specifications document that lists requirements, inputs and outputs, at planetary scale. Time to a 100 ppm CO2 reduction at planetary scale. Energy. Materials. Resources. Fuel. Transportation. CO2 and other emissions. Environmental/ecological effects. Etc. A standard format could be developed. This should not take more than a single page. Something like this would make it brutally easy to separate the nonsense from things we might actually want to focus on.