32 ms·

All poverty is energy poverty

• nkmnz 4y ago
  I'm sure there's a lot of intellectual and emotional poverty out there that cannot be alleviated by any source of energy.
  • nine_k 4y ago
    More energy and other life's amenities that are enabled by it can go a long way alleviating the intellectual and emotional poverty. It's pretty hard to be intellectual and kind when you toil for subsistence every day and barely have enough food.
  • kevingadd 4y ago
    (As someone who doesn't agree with the article's conclusions), someone living in poverty does not have the resources to address intellectual and emotional poverty. If you can't afford to own or run a refrigerator, do you really have the time to (for example) tutor your kids outside of school hours, see a therapist, spend time relaxing on the weekends and in the evenings? No. You're probably working three jobs.
  • hedora 4y ago
    As energy availability goes to infinity, labor demand goes to zero, so leisure time for education, hobbies, art, etc. increases.
• mcculley 4y ago
  If we had energy cheap enough for every human to live at the highest current levels of consumption, wouldn’t we have to do something with the waste heat? Radiator fins on space elevators? Or can we send it out into space from the ground?
  • coldtea 4y ago
    We can't even get a stable grid, decent infrastructure, or stocked supermarkets... let alone fancy technology. I would't hold my breat about that going forward.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    It's not a significant issue. All renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, biofuels) comes from the sun anyway and the only difference if that sunpower goes into 'waste heat' immediately or gets temporarily used for work before turning into the exact same amount of waste heat. Fossil fuels are releasing energy that was taken from the sun millions of years ago, but the direct heat outcome of burning all that is dwarfed by the greenhouse effect of emitted gasses - small changes to how much Earth radiates into space matter much more than the heat produced by burning that fuel. The same applies for nuclear, which does generate extra waste heat but it is not significant compared to the greenhouse effect.
  • gizmo686 4y ago
    Taking the articles figure of 77,000 kWh per year per person. Lets call it 100,000 (10^5) kWh per year per person and a population of 10 billion (10^10) people, we are looking at 10^15 kWh/year of energy, which is about 10^14 watts. Earth receives about 10^17 watts of solar energy, so we are looking at an increase of about %0.1 of the energy budget. This is ignoring energy coming from non solar sources (there is a lot of geothermnal energy coming from within the planet, but I'm not sure what rate that makes it to the surface). Interestingly, this still overestimates the role of our waste heat for an even simpler reason: much of it was going to be heat anyway. Waste heat generated from fossil fuels is pure extra energy (although that effect is still dwarfed by the greenhouse effect for anything beyond the very local area). Nuclear is effectively net positive on heat as the natural half life of the fuel is far longer then when it is put in a reactor. However, solar energy is by definition part of that 10^17 watts of energy that is going to hit the Earth weather we generated electrons from it or not (Granted, solar panels probably reflect less of that energy back into space). Wind energy is pulling kinetic energy out of the air that would have become heat. Geothermal is taking advantage of heat that was already there (although we accelerate how quickly it reaches the surface). Hydroelectic energy would have become heat once the water finished loosing its potential energy when it reaches sea level.
  • EdTsft 4y ago
    "A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use." [1] We have a long way to go before humanity's heat output is anywhere rivalling the heat the Sun dumps on us. Most of our power generation (except nuclear) is just repurposing the Sun's energy anyways, delaying its conversion into heat so that we can extract work from the process. The same heat is generated with or without our power plants. (Fossil fuels delay for so long that the energy release occurs at a much faster rate than it was gathered, but still insignificant compared to the regular solar energy incident on the Earth). [1]: https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026 https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
    • dredmorbius 4y ago
      Yes and no. If GDP is as tightly-coupled to energy use as data suggest, and we presume, say, 4% annual growth rate, then we have a slight issue. 10,000 times is just over 13 doubling periods' worth of growth. And 4% annual growth rate means doubling every 13.3 years, roughly. In which case, humans would cut into that 10,000-fold margin in slightly over 230 years. Which suggests that there are in fact limits to growth.
  • mcculley 4y ago
    I am amused by the optimism of these responses. Nobody is concerned that if we end up with cheap nuclear fusion that humanity won’t use a lot more of it? Would humans stop building resorts in deserts?
    • hedora 4y ago
      Deserts are a wonderful place for resorts, assuming it is man made desert (like the Sahara) and infinite energy to desalinate and recycle water in an ecologically sound way. We just aren't to that point yet.
      • mcculley 4y ago
        I am completely a proponent of humanity using cheap energy to elevate our standard of living to ridiculous levels. I’m just wondering what we will do with the waste heat. I cannot believe that we will limit ourselves to current levels of consumption.
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        I was unaware that the Sahara was man-made.
        • hedora 4y ago
          Yep; we overfarmed the crap out of it in prehistoric times, apparently.
          • dredmorbius 4y ago
            Given that the desert formed > 2 mya and human agriculture originated ~12 kya, this seems unlikely. Modern humans themselves originated only 200 kya. <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014Natur.513..401Z https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014Natur.513..401Z> <https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1886/origins-of-world-agriculture/ https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1886/origins-of-world-a...>
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  On this: > "There's probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda's annual energy usage. That's about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully one-third of Rwanda's current primary energy consumption." 1) Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH/day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half. 2) Energy capture for refrigeration from solar in Rwanda makes much more sense than oil production does. Under full sunlight, a decent 2.5 kW solar array produces about 10 kWH per day (as the full 2.5 KW is only produced at noon, tailing off towards morning and evening). As you probably want to run the refrigerator at night, a battery capable of storing about half that output (5 kWH) would also be needed. The notion that you'd want to set up an oil-burning power plant (which only converts energy stored in oil to electricity at ~25% efficiency or so) in Rwanda is pretty silly. As far as claims that there isn't enough land to set up solar panels to provide this minimal home energy supply, the roofs of most dwellings would provide adequate area. It's also possible to grow a wide variety of crops in conjunction with wind turbines and solar panels on agricultural land (wide spacing is all).
  • affgrff2 4y ago
    I don't think the author suggests to set up an oil-burning power plant, that number is just for visualization. And I guess you could even go without a battery at night by converting the energy from the daylight directly into cold.
  • ebiester 4y ago
    I think the point is explained further below - the author is making a reference to the amount of energy required if the world had a developed standard of living, not saying that we would ever use natural gas down there. > It can be done. In the near term, it is conceivable that already-common sources of renewable energy like wind and solar power can meet most of the need. Things would be easier if existing nuclear power technologies were expanded, or at least if we avoided shutting such plants down prematurely. > But the more fanciful world described above—the one in which, thanks to plentiful energy, the world has eliminated want—is possible only with continued innovation. In the long term, the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling.
• brink 4y ago
  Or another way I like to put it - unnafordable energy = unaffordable everything.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• Victerius 4y ago
  More reading: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Worlds-Energy-Problem-Is-Far-Worse-Than-Were-Being-Told.html https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Worlds-Energy-Prob... > No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost. > This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse. And Hyman Rickover's 1957 speech on energy and scarcity: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predicting-peak-oil/ https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predi... Climate change is chiefly caused by two things: uncontrolled population growth and energy consumption growth. A high standard of living - and civilization itself - is impossible without high energy consumption per capita. Do you see the problem? I can think of solutions that would be effective, but it would involve a lot of suffering.
  • cdiamand 4y ago
    That first article just reads like scare porn, calibrated to maximize clicks, while being light on actual substance. It looks like the author has a history of writing like this. I wonder what her track record of being "right" is?
  • pickovven 4y ago
    You might be pleased to learn that the Malthusians have a nearly 200 year record of being wrong.
    • Victerius 4y ago
      Malthus was right. He was just ahead of his time. There are too many people in the world and it's the cause of climate change and almost every problem.
• Gravityloss 4y ago
  Telephony is one of the analogies. Many developing countries' rural villages could simply leapfrog the landline telephone technology and move directly to cell phones. Computers - instead of desktops, straight to smart phones and tablets. Banking - instead of a lot of bank branch offices and having to travel and queue, straight to online banking (and even being very advanced compared to many western countries). It could be so with refrigeration. Solar power is potentially a really good fit for that. Maybe electric scooters will do a lot for mobility at some point and people can skip the whole car thing.
• ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  I assumed they were just going to ignore renewables, since the kind of person who writes these things generally does. But instead they weirdly skipped over it and started fantasizing about some new technology that doesn't exist yet. What happened to energy poverty being important? "The current cheapest, cleanest, safest sources of energy in history aren't green enough for me" was not an ending I expected. Is this intentional pro-fossil fuels propaganda, written with full self-knowledge of that fact, or are they just so wrapped up in lies that they think this weird rant somehow reflects reality and is helpful to society? I genuinely don't get it. Is it possible to write that many words on a topic and intentionally get "primary energy" wrong and believe that it reflects the actual useful economic work done? They mention nuclear a couple of times, so surely they're aware that nuclear can generate both heat and electricity and it's the electricity that's most helpful? Quick summary from the boring stodgy IEA https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/7ebafc81-74ed-412b-9c60-5cc32c8396e4/NetZeroby2050-ARoadmapfortheGlobalEnergySector-SummaryforPolicyMakers_CORR.pdf https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/7ebafc81-74ed-412b-... > In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is around 8% smaller than today, but it serves an economy more than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more people. More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for energy services as the world economy grows and access to energy is extended to all. > Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely on renewable energy. Two-thirds of total energy supply in 2050 is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy. Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of energy supplies. Solar PV capacity increases 20-fold between now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold. > Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce. > Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy consumption in 2050. It plays a key role across all sectors – from transport and buildings to industry – and is essential to produce low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional new final investment decisions should be taken for new unabated coal plants, the least efficient coal plants are phased out by 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are retrofitted. > By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
• _vdpp 4y ago
  I’ve long suspected that currencies are really just units of measurement convertible to the joule (or calorie).
  • bowsamic 4y ago
    Have you read Marx?
    • contravariant 4y ago
      Kind of interesting to note that 'work' (as in physical energy) and 'labour' use the same word in German.
      • inciampati 4y ago
        And English. clarification: those words are 100% exact synonyms. (Native speaker, of American at least.)
      • whatch 4y ago
        As in Russian (and I guess in Ukrainian).
        • drran 4y ago
          In Ukrainian: work - робота, labour - праця.
      • samber 4y ago
        in french too
      • alangibson 4y ago
        Yea, but power is Kraft.
        • _Microft 4y ago
          German "Kraft"[0] as physical term means "force" in English, while "power" translates as "Leistung"[1]. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leistung_(Physik) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leistung_(Physik)
• bottlepalm 4y ago
  In order to build systems to extract and use energy requires an educated society - that is the root deficiency. And it’s a lot more than just dropping books from airplanes.
  • ebiester 4y ago
    What if that's mixing cause and effect? If you have energy, you have refrigeration. You have the manufacturing properties to produce the things necessary for children to focus on education. You have the agricultural properties to increase yield and reduce the number of people needed for the agricultural sector, making education more valuable.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • svnt 4y ago
      > If you have energy, you have refrigeration. Not without having invented and scaled manufacturing for the refrigerator is the point. It is clearly not a given that access to energy results in the existence of certain technologies, although it does increase their probability of existence. All of these things intermix. Having energy is a cause and an effect.
    • bottlepalm 4y ago
      Educated societies existed before refrigeration and manufacturing so those aren’t prerequisites. The real prerequisite is an ‘educated society’ so there’s a bit of a bootstrapping/chicken/egg problem which is super difficult to solve.
      • 8note 4y ago
        Cooled areas existed before refrigeration too. What changed is the incentives and relative ease of different ways of cooling
  • xyzzyz 4y ago
    18th and 19th century Brits who first built these systems were not very educated by our standards. Many of them, in fact, were uneducated tinkerers.
• woeh 4y ago
  > At its core, however, the math here is very simple. In the US, the average person uses 77,000 kWh per year. The average Finn uses only about 58,000 kWh. The Brits, good global citizens, use only about 30,000 kWh on average. Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses about 2100kWh annually. This is in my case without gas-powered heating, and external power use (such as personal transportation, or production of bought goods). I can understand if these more indirect uses of energy are included in the average, however it would be helpful for the discussion if these numbers were explained. It might for instance help to explain how the West can slash it's energy use five fold, as the article suggests.
  • megaman821 4y ago
    It's hard to tell from the link, but this seems to be comparing the US' electricity consumption to the UK's electricity consumption. Most of the UK's energy use is from burning fuel for heat. Using energy and electricity as interchangeable is very confusing. That said, I would assume if you included all energy usage the US would still be a lot more because we drive so much more.
    • leoedin 4y ago
      It's looking at total energy consumption, not electricity consumption. The UK only generates about 4500 kWh per person each year - far off that 30,000 kWh number. In the UK (not sure about the US, but it's probably similar), about 25% of our energy consumption is space heating, 30% is road transport, 10% is air transport, 11% is domestic use and the remaining 24% or so is services and industrial. We don't really do AC here - I imagine that's a big chunk of use in southern US states. The big thing that the article doesn't mention is that "developed" western countries outsource vast amounts of manufacturing energy usage to other countries. The UK is especially bad for this. We don't make most of our steel, aluminium, plastics or chemicals - so the many kWh required to make them isn't reported in our statistics. China does that for us.
      • 4y ago
• Ozzie_osman 4y ago
  Interesting to see the comment thread digging into all sorts of criticism of the article (is it 2 kWh / fridge? Or 1.1? Should the author discuss renewable earlier or more seriously?) The main point I got from the article was a helpful reminder that a large part of the world doesn't have basic things that I take for granted (not just refrigeration, but you might also include air conditioning, transportation, etc). And that if we did want the entire world to live a life that includes things like that, we just don't have the energy right now. EDIT: I kept thinking about this and it doesn't stop at just basics. It's also things like living in a comfortable, well-manufactured home. Being able to buy toys for your kids. Taking airplanes to visit family or to vacation. Enjoying the consumption of meat, or food delicacies. The list goes on as you expand the threshold from basic necessities, to comfort, to luxuries, and you can decide where you want to draw the line.
  • ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    We do have the energy right now, though. And we'd have more, cheaper energy if we deployed new renewables. But the author seems to lose his interest in helping the poor if it didn't involve fossil fuels being used inefficiently.
    • naavis 4y ago
      Building renewables requires mining for precious metals and rare earths though, which is very energy-intensive. So to deploy these non-polluting renewable energy sources, you first have to pollute a lot. And it's not even clear if there are enough resources on Earth to do this. Solar panels, batteries, wind mills and such do not appear out of thin air.
    • PeterisP 4y ago
      We're on track on a big part of Europe being energy-restricted this winter, so at least right now there's not an abundance of energy even for the current needs of the first world, much less for those who cannot pay much and would need not the same amount but growth. In the long term many things are possible, but right now we don't have enough energy, and "if we deployed new renewables" is not an argument - we already are deploying new renewables pretty much as fast as we can, and even if we would deploy them twice as fast, it will still take quite some time to get to where renewables can create all the energy we need - especially if look at the market share of renewables in total energy which includes not only electricity but also heating and transportation.
• coldtea 4y ago
  Not really. A lot of poverty is societal poverty (of order, collaboration, help, education, distribution, and so on) and is worse, even all other things (like relative cost of energy to average salary) being equal. You can be a slum-living destitute poor in a country even though you have financial access personally to several times the energy expenditure of someone in another country (or area of same country) with a different lifestyle.
  • cryptonector 4y ago
    Have you spent much time in an energy-poor country?
  • influxmoment 4y ago
    Yea it looks like most poverty now is political. Like North Korea or war torn countries. I think most countries if they had good political leadership could be wealthy
    • mellavora 4y ago
      Corruption is the enemy of social progress.
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  • mellavora 4y ago
    Thank you. I was going to make the same post. I'm a huge fan of all of the mod-cons, but for most of human history people lived with pre-industrial-revolution levels of tech. And we still had rich and poor. Poverty is when you don't have a good place in society, lack of respect by your fellows, and no security for your physical safety or property.
    • hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
      I think this misses the point of the article. Yes, the world has had, and will always have, rich and poor. But to raise the poor up, what you fundamentally need is more energy. I think this article also does a good job in emphasizing country-level poverty is what's really important to think about. That is, in the US, since we already have the infrastructure of a rich country, even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration (but even then it's not evenly distributed, e.g. much has been written about "food deserts" in the US). But, in say, Nigeria, they are so undersupplied with refrigeration trucks that making it possible for the poor to get reliable access to safe food would take a massive investment, which would mean a lot more energy.
• gizmo686 4y ago
  Energy is not sufficient to do stuff. You still need a thing to convert that energy into something useful, and those things cost money as well. Taking refrigeration as an example; using my local home improvement store as an example (which isn't the most representative for the costs applicable to national development, but should be good enough for napkin math): A refrigerator/freezer running at 1.17 KwH/day goes for about $800 USD. [0] For $100 USD, I can get a solar panel that claims about 300 Wh/day[1] This puts the cost of energy at about the same as the cost of making the energy useful. Obviously Rwanda isn't going to buy retail from Home Depot. Further, I suspect that when done at scale, you will find that the discount you see over retail for energy is more significant than the discount you see for refrigerators. Granted, making the refrigerator requires energy. However, it also requires a factory and components. Making those requires energy, but also other factories and components. Looking at how this plays out in a developed country. In the US 2021, the electricity industry had a revenue of about $430 Billion [2], for an economy with a GDP of about 23 Trillion [3]. In total, energy accounts for about 5% of GDP. [4] Running that $800 USD refrigerator I mentions above would cost me about $0.08 USD/day Sure, doing stuff requires energy, and we need to prepare for the energy demands of developing nations to increase. However, the cost of energy is a small fraction of the cost of most of the stuff you want to do with the energy. Sure, if energy was orders of magnitude cheaper, then that may enable more usages of energy, but even those things would require investment beyond energy generation to do. [0] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-20-5-cu-ft-Top-Freezer-Refrigerator-in-Stainless-Steel-FRTD2021AS/318833857#overlay https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-20-5-cu-ft-Top-Freeze... [1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Grape-Solar-100-Watt-Monocrystalline-Solar-Panel-for-RV-s-Boats-and-12-V-Systems-GS-Star-100W/204211365 https://www.homedepot.com/p/Grape-Solar-100-Watt-Monocrystal... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190548/revenue-of-the-us-electric-power-industry-since-1970/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/190548/revenue-of-the-us... [3] https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-fourth-quarter-and-year-2021-advance-estimate https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-fourth-... [4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53620 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53620
  • NavinF 4y ago
    You ignored inverter, battery, battery replacement, and installation costs. All that has to be amortized along with the interest rate or opportunity cost of tying up your capital. There a lot of refrigerators cheaper than $800 and just about all of them cost more to power than to buy.
• hedora 4y ago
  > In order to hit the 2050 target, we therefore need to be using about 1500 TWh per year — 1% of current global energy consumption. It's infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet. It's even more infuriating now that I've read H.G. Well's "The World Set Free.", which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy take on current day energy politics. The problems it focuses on haven't been addressed, and we're living the worst case scenario the book posits. (The better case scenario the book focuses on is a global collapse of government due to full scale nuclear war in the early days of atomic weaponry.)
  • spicybright 4y ago
    Not that story telling is the ultimate solution, but I share the frustration. So many of these old stories are essentially coming true, and there's not much discussion on it by most people. That said, we have some very good cautionary tales like black mirror that make people think, but those are very few. In fact, most stories in this genre start with "in an apocalyptic world where people X, Y happens". It would be nice to see some modern black-mirror quality adaptations of ideas by H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and even authors like Mark Twain would be great.
  • svnt 4y ago
    It’s a failure of education, and in many ways a deliberate one because of the primacy of industry over the past century.
    • hedora 4y ago
      It's a systematic failure of government going back at least two centuries. In 1913, people were making identical complaints about the government and courts (especially regarding IP) as they do today.
      • svnt 4y ago
        I agree — I think often where there is a prolonged failure of democratic government it is a result of insufficient attention to updating the education of the voting population.
• avgcorrection 4y ago
  I remember a scene in Sopranos where Tony told off his lietunants for not making a enough money for him. “This business is like a pyramid” (more or less). Where would the rich gangsters be if the low-level thugs had enough money in order to not pursue crime? They would still have those who are more in it for the thrill than the money, but would it be enough? This article focuses on the fantastic tech. breakthroughs that need to happen. Let’s assume for a second that all of that is possible in a world without antagonisms. But what if rich entities are better served by other entities being poor than then being of moderate means? What would be the energy output of those antagonisms manifesting themselves? That should also be taken into account.
• nuclearnice3 4y ago
  Here's a more optimistic take especially with regard to solar. > There’s really no end in sight yet for improvements in solar and batteries. Cost drops are continuing simply from scaling up, and new materials and technologies are on the horizon that could generate continued price declines per unit of energy. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessimists-part-a3b https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessi...
  • manholio 4y ago
    Battery electrochemistry still has headroom, but solar is already approaching the Shockley–Queisser ceiling, which limits efficiency at about 30% for single junction and 50% for multiple junction devices. That's the absolute conversion limit, similar to the Carnot limit for thermal engines. So if you can buy today cells that are 18-20% efficient, you should not expect dramatic improvements in the next decades, only very gradual. The cost will continue to drop, so given the huge areas available for solar, the potential is still huge.
    • gizmo686 4y ago
      The Shockley–Queisser ceiling describes the limit of energy per unit area. It says nothing about the efficiency in terms of energy per unit money.
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        Manufacturing (and installation, operations, and maintenance) efficiencies are more likely governed by Wright's Law, a/k/a Experience Curve Effects, which holds that there is about a 20% efficiency gain with each doubling of output. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_curve_effects> This was first observed during WWII in aircraft and ship manufacture. Note that this tends to be gains toward some ultimate efficiency limit, so remains bounded. I've mentioned the concept a few times in earlier HN comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20wright%27s%20law&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>
• gadders 4y ago
  There seems to be a choice between artificially holding back energy generation due to net zero concerns keeping more people in poverty for longer, or we could pursue fossil fuels and nuclear and lift more people out of poverty now (and presumably hope for a future fix/mitigation for climate impacts). I wonder which would save most lives overall? I would also note that those living in poverty currently don't seem to have a vote on the approach to take.
  • hedora 4y ago
    Per the article, this is a false dichotomy. If we increase energy production by 1%, and use it for carbon capture, then we will have a carbon negative economy.
    • gadders 4y ago
      Increase energy production using fossil fuels?
• geysersam 4y ago
  This is not a good take. Look at Iraq or Venezuela. No lack of energy, but plenty of poverty nonetheless.
  • klabb3 4y ago
    The energy must be spent within the region to count. Those countries export it.
    • geysersam 4y ago
      Why do they export it then? Because abundance of energy is not the only kind of poverty there is.
      • klabb3 4y ago
        Because of corruption and foreign interference, same as with any other form of asset. I don't see any conflict with the thesis of the article.
      • missedthecue 4y ago
        In Venezuela's case it's because they don't have refineries that can process their heavy crude. What else would they possibly do other than export it?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • jibe 4y ago
    You raise an interesting point - Venezuela has an abundance of oil, but also blackouts and a general shortages at the same time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Venezuelan_blackouts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Venezuelan_blackouts So you need energy but also stability. And minimizing corruption helps as well. Air dropping barrels of oil, or solar panels without regard for social, civil, and technical infrastructure isn't that helpful. But there are a lot of areas that are primed and would benefit from just adding energy.
  • 4y ago
• spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Growing up in Indian small towns in the 90s, I remember how people would casually mention the number of air conditioners they had in their house. The cost of the AC, while hefty, wasn’t that big of a deal. The real brag was that they could afford to keep X number of ACs running. Even today, my dad switches off the AC in his room early morning to cut down on his power bills.
• oulipo 4y ago
  I would claim that poverty also comes from impoverished ecosystems, and lack of civil rights, so it's really wealth = access to energy + clean environment + civil rights
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    I'd say more human rights than civil rights. Human rights are the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
    • cristal_lake 4y ago
      Nah man, we need more rights of course. Forget about liberty and shit, we just need more
• manholio 4y ago
  All poverty is institutional and societal poverty. People are poor not because of lack of energy, but because the societies they live in lack the inclusive institutions that can create those patterns for energy use, education, healthcare and anything else. When you put those institutions in place, the effect manifests itself as economic growth, energy use, increased education etc., which in turn strengthen those political institutions, which in turn beget more growth. Sorry to nitpick an article that primarily talks about energy, not development, but we need to agree on the root problem. If aliens drop an unmovable fusion reactor in Rwanda tomorrow that can output enough free energy to reach western levels, that will probably not lift the country out of poverty but start a bloody civil war about who owns it and can sell the energy to everybody else.
  • WalterBright 4y ago
    It's not inclusive institutions, it's the people don't have the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I.e. free markets.
    • manholio 4y ago
      Markets are just an abstraction that's built on strong institutions: property rights, an inclusive justice system that can settle commercial disputes and punish the antisocial, a state that can tax that commercial activity and reinvest the proceeds into infrastructure. Without those institutions, markets cannot exist, you are just at the whim of a connected competitor, local gang leader, extractive and corrupt government official or unavoidable private monopoly that will fleece everything you create. Therefore you don't waste energy investing and creating for the market, and focus on extracting from someone else.
      • WalterBright 4y ago
        Free markets require a government, and a government acts as guarantor of the rights needed for the free market to function. A free market is not a market without a government.
• Proven 4y ago
• m3kw9 4y ago
  I would say energy doesn’t just appear itself, it comes from good infrastructure+support, which comes from a well planning from the government, which also require the govt to be competent, which require a well govt structure. Therefore the energy correlation is there but not a causation.
• dukeofdoom 4y ago
  Also even here and Europe when price of energy goes up poor people swich to burning wood or coal. This is bad for enviroment and the air qualit in their house causing disease. Alot of the policy decisions are made by people least affected by them. This also explains rise of Trump and populisim. Here in Canada, in our 5 party system, Trudue was voted in by the margin of office workers in Toronto. And proceeded locked down hard, responding to their hypochondriac fears. Their suffering of laptop work from home and food delivert to their door was so bad that many wanted to extend the lockdowns indefinetly.
• mkl95 4y ago
  You can be poor while easily meeting your energy needs. A classic example is remote rural areas where virtually all inhabitants own some plot of land. Even if they are poor they can feed their fireplace with some wood, for free.
  • lostapathy 4y ago
    There’s an awful lot of the world where there isn’t wood available to do that. Like the plains of the US, even in Native American times trees were too precious to burn.
  • Panzer04 4y ago
    Sure, but your standard of living will be lower. The energy needs he's talking about include all usage, including that which you get from burning wood on your land. There's nowhere near enough natural wood worldwide to meet our energy consumption
• steve76 4y ago
• olivermarks 4y ago
  I can't help thinking of the 'Milton Friedman' quote 'If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand' expanded out to the giant unelected global bureaucracies some people would appear to want to give permission to run energy supplies.
  • rglover 4y ago
    This is the ultimate truth that, for whatever reason (emotional/egoic as far as I can tell), gets conveniently ignored. Truly sad to see humanity limit/destroy itself over and over when there are perfectly viable options available.
    • olivermarks 4y ago
      The reality is that politicians and large businesses always want to centralize everyone around their single core to control the market/services etc, whether 'left' or 'right', and their propaganda/pr is always subtly pushing problem/reaction/solution to further those goals... The panopticon controls enabled by AI & IoT can easily be used to meter/control energy (and separately water) to individuals. This is of huge concern around 'smart meters'
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• alas44 4y ago
  Interesting related presentation on what is energy and how it relates to the economy from a physical point of view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA&t=3367 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA&t=3367 Note: presented in a controversial way, that's the style of this speaker
• verisimi 4y ago
  Well, let's remove taxes on oil, etc! Let's stop putting governmental barriers in place such as when recently Canada refused permission to build natural gas plants. Governance needs to step out of the way, and let the free market do what it needs to! (for the avoidance of doubt, not being sarcastic)
• MicolashKyoka 4y ago
  I hope that the advent of better solar energy extraction and automation (things like Tesla's robot) will usher us into an era of abundance. Self-sustaining robot factories would give us the means of almost unlimited labor that we could task with building out all the infrastructure we'd need to lift humanity away from the reaches of nature's tyranny.
  • visarga 4y ago
    I love the idea of self-sustaining AI driven automation. But unless the system is capable of 100% recycling, it needs raw materials. Some of those are going to become contested.
• westurner 4y ago
  "The Limits to Growth" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth Carrying capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity > The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s.[1] The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population. Sustainable population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population : > Talk of economic and population growth leading to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity for humans are popular in environmentalism.[16] The potential limiting factor for the human population might include water availability, energy availability, renewable resources, non-renewable resources, heat removal, photosynthetic capacity, and land availability for food production.[17] The applicability of carrying capacity as a measurement of the Earth's limits in terms of the human population has not been very useful, as the Verhulst equation does not allow an unequivocal calculation and prediction of the upper limits of population growth.[16] > [...] The application of the concept of carrying capacity for the human population, which exists in a non-equilibrium, is criticized for not successfully being able to model the processes between humans and the environment.[16][20] In popular discourse the concept has largely left the domain of academic consideration, and is simply used vaguely in the sense of a "balance between nature and human populations".[20] Practically, if you can find something sustainable to do with brine (NaCL; Sodium Chloride and), and we manage to achieve cheap clean energy, and we can automate humanoid labor, desalinating water and pumping it inland is feasible; so, global water prices shouldn't then be the limit to our carrying capacity. #Goal6 #CleanWater Water trading > Alternatives to water trading markets (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading LCOE: Levelized Cost of Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity LCOW: Levelized Cost of Water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_water https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_water TIL about modern methods for drilling water wells on youtube: with a hand drill, with a drive cap and a sledgehammer and a pitcher-pump after a T with valves for an optional (loud) electric pump, or a solar electric water pump Drinking water > Water Quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water#Water_quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water#Water_quality : > Nearly 4.2 billion people worldwide had access to tap water, while another 2.4 billion had access to wells or public taps.[3] The World Health Organization considers access to safe drinking-water a basic human right. > About 1 to 2 billion people lack safe drinking water.[4] Water can carry vectors of disease. More people die from unsafe water than from war, then-U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in 2010.[5] Third world countries are most affected by lack of water, flooding, and water quality. Up to 80 percent of illnesses in developing countries are the direct result of inadequate water and sanitation. [6] A helpful risk hierarchy chart: "The risk hierarchy for water sources used in private drinking water supplies": From Lowest Risk to Highest Risk: Mains water, Rainwater, Deep groundwater, Shallow groundwater, Surface water TIL it's possible to filter Rainwater with an unglazed terracotta pot and no electricity, too Also, TIL about solid-state heat engines ("thermionic converters") with no moving parts, that only need a thermal gradient in order to generate electricity. The difference between #VantaBlack and #VantaWhite in the sun results in a thermal gradient, for example Is a second loop and a heat exchange even necessary if solid-state heat engines are more efficient than gas turbines? Any exothermic reaction?! FWIU, we only need 100°C to quickly purify water.
• sunjester 4y ago
  I think this article assumes that all people want the same things out of life, such as comfort and refrigeration, but this is not the case with "everyone".
  • youssefabdelm 4y ago
    Yeah I think the market for people who want to be uncomfortable is huge. /s
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• nine_k 4y ago
  One of the most insightful quotes I ever found of HN: «The limiting factor for [civilizations] is collective intelligence, not energy. We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28232083 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28232083
  • avgcorrection 4y ago
    It all being about IQ is truley the archetypical HN comment.
    • nine_k 4y ago
      What's your take on the capacity the deficiency of which prevents us, as a species, from making right choices that are going to improve the well-being of everyone? E.g. from harvesting abundant energy our star rains on our planet, when we already have the technologies to capture it? Are we lacking kindness? Virtue? Faith? Strength?
      • avgcorrection 4y ago
        If we were smarter we would just exploit each other/“the Earth” harder because we use our intelligence for selfish and short-term gain. So yes we lack kindness to put it mildly.
        • nine_k 4y ago
          The whole problem is exactly selfish short-term gain that eclipses longer-term common gain. Lack of understanding it, and lack of the ability to create a social system that works better towards it, to my mind, is directly related to our (limited) intelligence as a species. Lack of kindness does play a serious role, can't disagree.
          • avgcorrection 4y ago
• rootbear 4y ago
  I just sat through a talk at Worldcon by Henry Spencer that addressed some of these issues. He presented the case that to provide the energy we need to address future needs, including raising the standard of living in Third World countries, we’ll need space based solar power.
  • dredmorbius 4y ago
    Any sort of link or title that you can recall or find?
    • rootbear 4y ago
      I don't think that was one of the talks that was live streamed, so there won't be a recording. I'm traveling today so I'll have to look for it when I get back. Henry may have a website, I'll look for that too.
      • dredmorbius 4y ago
        Thanks, I'd appreciate it. Often talks of such nature even if extemporaneous or unrecorded are based on on a line of development that leaves traces elsewhere. I'm not finding a homepage or blog. None is mentioned in his Wikipedia bio. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Spencer>
• the_gipsy 4y ago
  > the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling. Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland. There are only so many places you can put a windmill, and only so many rivers to dam. Is this true? I have never seen this argument against renewables, is there any math? I can't imagine running out of space, with panels on roofs and windmills between fields.
  • hedora 4y ago
    No, it isn't close to true; there are more than enough roofs and unfarmable plots of land. Anyway, if it were true, fission is clean enough and unlimited enough for all practical purposes. Fusion is even better (in theory).
    • the_gipsy 4y ago
      Thanks, I thought so. The article proposes an interesting relationship between energy and basic humanitarian needs, but takes a sudden sharp turn on renewables and nuclear.
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• abetusk 4y ago
  This article is exceptional. It may be reductive or even wrong but at least it's trying to quantify these issues and it uses actual data. Not only does this allow for analysis, it also makes it, in theory, falsifiable. If the article is right and all it takes is around a doubling of the current global energy, at 1.1% population growth and a global annual increase in energy usage of 2.5%, this gives around 50 years before we start producing enough energy to push poverty levels below 1%.
• haltingproblem 4y ago
  Quibble with the numbers all you want, but there is a fundamental truth in this visible to anyone who grew up in the third world amidst poverty. One of the biggest (hidden) revolution in healthcare for poor rural Indian women is availability of LPG cylinders to replace fossil fuels - wood and cow dung - for cooking. Fossil fuels cause lung deaths [1] due to indoor pollution. The green agenda cuts against it. The biggest enabler to education is electrification. I vividly remember growing up 20 years ago that only the middle class with electrification could afford to compete in schools as you needed to power light bulbs to study at night. No electrification and reliable supply then you cannot study. The situation is worse in villages with no electrification. Forget computers and internet, this is just about having enough to power a 40 W equivalent light bulb to read a book. Many times, the agenda of the liberal west seems like class warfare against the poor of the third world: "we will not give up our heated/cooled mansions and our SUVs and our extravagant vacations across the globe but will make energy so expensive that you are crowded out of the market". A British business can afford a 20-50% power bill hike or even go out of business, a third world poor citizen is pushed over the edge into grinding poverty. [1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1178622119874314 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1178622119874314
• osigurdson 4y ago
  We need far cheaper solar panels and batteries as a starting point.
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• colinsane 4y ago
  in tech, the ever-increasing availability of computation has widespread effects that haven’t always been easy to predict. - computation gets used to automate billing in the telecom and finance industries. - a little bit faster and arcades explode across the globe. - a little bit faster and CAD transforms how the transportation industry approaches engineering. - a little bit faster and radio astronomy can correct all the measurement distortions digitally and image everything with greater effective precision. - a little bit faster and we can simulate more aspects of chemistry or biology and identify beneficial drugs more easily. energy experiences this same thing: each incremental decrease pushes some latent tech/application past its tipping point and soon enough the landscape looks completely different at $0.10/kWh than at $10.00/kWh. consider in the list above that all the tech advances aren’t just due to the FLOPS of your computing base, but also the cost to operate that computation — which is fundamentally tied to energy prices.
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• betwixthewires 4y ago
  > Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland. This is my main problem with it. I'm concerned that the environmental damage from these energy sources is worse than that from less dirty fossil fuel sources like natural gas.
• CompelTechnic 4y ago
  One thing I find troubling about environmentalism is that the tendency to try to make everything more energy efficient/ optimized for the environment risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a few ways: -More expensive energy directly leads to less energy-intensive activity, and a lot of this energy-intensive activity is the sort of activity that helps human flourishing. -A tendency to regulate activity such that the most energy-optimized activity is the only allowable/ affordable activity. -Regulating away the ability to do things, especially things that have questionable externalities and the regulators don't see the immediate value of. Is it really a good thing that the Netherlands is destroying the livelihoods of farmers to protect natural areas from Nitrogen emissions? Who quantified the harm associated with the nitrogen emissions? How does this harm food security in the Netherlands? How does this fare in relation to the fact that energy independence and food independence go hand-in-hand, at a time when there is a global fertilizer shortage and a European energy shortage? Seems short-sighted to me.
  • m463 4y ago
    The saying I recall is: "You can't save yourself rich"
  • Arn_Thor 4y ago
    Regulation is short-sighted? You say this in a world that's burning up because no one imposed on emitters the cost of the externalities of those emissions... Now that is short-sighted.
• csense 4y ago
  If climate change is an existential threat, we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit. If you truly believe climate change is super serious, then logically government ought to put its thumb on the scale to ensure a lot of people get priced out of energy intensive products like air conditioning, leaving their computers on at night, meat, aluminum, and so on. If you're a nationalist, it's even better if the people we're impoverishing are overseas, and therefore the poverty we create to save the planet is Somebody Else's Problem. It's like people on the left have two conflicting goals, and haven't figured out how to deal with their mutual exclusivity: - We have to Save the Planet, so we need to stop being Evil Greedy Capitalists and using a bunch of energy. - We have to Help the Poor, so we need to stop the Evil Greedy Capitalists from making energy expensive and keeping it out of reach of the poor. (Personally, I believe climate change is real and human-caused, but its worst effects will take place over many years, and we'll have enough time to adapt to it. If New York City will be underwater by 2080, so be it. Manhattanites will figure out that they need to relocate when the water is lapping at their ankles; they won't stick around until it's over their heads. I subscribe to the Millian view that technology and abundance generally helps human progress, so we ought to be focused on making energy as cheap as possible. For example, fusion research is woefully underfunded relative to its potential.)
  • lossolo 4y ago
    > we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit. Gas prices are so high right now in EU that my fathers sister is closing her restaurant and letting go her employees. If they go even higher then what you will see is blood on the streets and right wing governments in power, then you can forger about your plans to save the planet. You think we are so slow with fighting climate change because we don't know how to do it faster? We know, just the costs of doing it are so huge that no one will take responsibility for it and they know they would lose power very quickly to far right wing party. Every civilization is always three missed meals from revolution.
    • hedora 4y ago
      Hypothetically, assume gas prices doubled again via a tax increase, but the government used the proceeds to give everyone a free heatpump + induction range and built out so much nuclear / solar that electric bills halved. I'd argue that would be a good outcome. However, it can't happen over night. The frustrating thing is that the necessary technology has been available for 50 years, but the right wing governments you allude to are exactly the reason they haven't been deployed at adequate scale. (Well, them and the anti-nuclear greens.) Sorry to hear about the restaurant. That really sucks.
• Barrin92 4y ago
  No, all poverty is organizational, one can have plenty of access or energy without the capacity to deploy it in a way that alleviates poverty or solves a problem, and the other way around plenty of technologies exist that utilize very little energy to great effect. The Soviet Union was for a long time the second largest consumer and biggest producer of energy in the world, but its society was characterized by low efficiency and relatively little output per unit of energy consumed. Your supercomputer from the 80s ate a lot of energy but didn't necessarily do a lot of work, economic or otherwise. Almost all devices we use now are less energy hungry but more useful than they were decades ago. They've gotten better not through energy consumption but better design. In the same sense refrigeration or artificial cooling isn't necessarily the only way to deal with heat. One could think of lifestyles, food choices, technologies, or supply chains that are optimized for a particular region that reduce the amount of storage required, or a city designed around maximizing architecture and shade to cool with less need for AC, and so on. The Artic Apple is genetically engineered to not brown, eliminating food waste not by energy consumption but genetic engineering. There should be more work on flexible solutions tailored to individual communities rather than trying to push the 20th century industrial solutions on places which largely cannot support or maintain them.
• waynesonfire 4y ago
  Jordan peterson made a video a few weeks ago talking about the importance of lifting poverty in context of global climate change. Super interesting https://youtu.be/--QS_UyW2SY https://youtu.be/--QS_UyW2SY
• neilwilson 4y ago
  "Every time money changes hands, GDP goes up. And every time money changes hands, that's usually becomes someone is doing something. As we've seen, that takes energy. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that GDP and energy are highly correlated." Which is where economics goes wrong. The working units are incorrect. You'll note that economics likes to use currency as its working denomination, when the actual underlying denominations are kWh and the labour hour. Nearly all the failures of macroeconomics can be laid at the belief that there is a one-to-one correlation between moving money around and doing stuff. There isn't and that's the problem. The issue is similar to electrical engineers assuming that true power and apparent power are always the same.
  • snapplebobapple 4y ago
    You are giving way too much credit to moving money = doing stuff as the cause of failure of macro economics. There's so much wrong with macro. Check out Steve Keens' The New Econmics: A manifesto for some of the major things wrong with macro.
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