3 ms·

2kW isn't starvation, it's abundance, luxury, and leisure for all. Especially if used efficiently (medium sized buildings, mass transit and low speed transport,

2kW isn't starvation, it's abundance, luxury, and leisure for all. Especially if used efficiently (medium sized buildings, mass transit and low speed transport, power efficient durable applicances. We can have rich fulfilling lives on a fraction of that. 20kW is obscene needless waste, wholesale destruction of anything near a city or industrial area, exhaustion of every scarce resource and with the albedo increase and waste heat it entails will give us climate change just through sheer thermal output.

kazinator 4y ago
20 kW is a little more than the 25 hp engine of a VW beetle from the 1950's. (1 hp ~= 0.75 kW). A PA system for a rock concert might be 20 kW.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  And if everyone had a beetle engine running full power 24/7 we would have run out of oil decades ago and every urban or even suburban area would be uninhabitable. A rock concert serves hundreds or thousands of people for a few tens of hours in a year. It adds milliwatts. 20kW each is 160TW. 20kW of work per person if prodiced in the area is enough to double the heat that a city like paris has to dissipate. At 160TW from fission, world uranium reserves last a single year in a LWR or a few decades at full burnup (which basically no nuclear programs do). Thorium reserves would barely last longer. At 160TW from PV we need 100 million tonnes of panels to be produced per year just for maintenance and to cover an absurd amount of land. Current tech would use all of the silver ten times over. Copper in the panels and wiring would use 5-100% of world reserves. At 160TW direct thermal forcing is 1W/m^2 which isn't as catastrophic as 500ppm CO2, but is about the current GHG forcing (which is just going super swell). Take into account any realistic generation scenario (3W/W of heating from nuclear or 2W/W of albedo increase) and you're in a 2 or 3 degree heating scenario on top of our GHG problems. Add in a few billion more people and any 20kW future is apocalyptic. 20kW is obscene and if you think a lifestyle based on that level of wanton waste can be sustained without forcing many others in other places and other times to suffer you are deluded.

kazinator 4y ago

20 kW is a little more than the 25 hp engine of a VW beetle from the 1950's. (1 hp ~= 0.75 kW). A PA system for a rock concert might be 20 kW.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
And if everyone had a beetle engine running full power 24/7 we would have run out of oil decades ago and every urban or even suburban area would be uninhabitable. A rock concert serves hundreds or thousands of people for a few tens of hours in a year. It adds milliwatts. 20kW each is 160TW. 20kW of work per person if prodiced in the area is enough to double the heat that a city like paris has to dissipate. At 160TW from fission, world uranium reserves last a single year in a LWR or a few decades at full burnup (which basically no nuclear programs do). Thorium reserves would barely last longer. At 160TW from PV we need 100 million tonnes of panels to be produced per year just for maintenance and to cover an absurd amount of land. Current tech would use all of the silver ten times over. Copper in the panels and wiring would use 5-100% of world reserves. At 160TW direct thermal forcing is 1W/m^2 which isn't as catastrophic as 500ppm CO2, but is about the current GHG forcing (which is just going super swell). Take into account any realistic generation scenario (3W/W of heating from nuclear or 2W/W of albedo increase) and you're in a 2 or 3 degree heating scenario on top of our GHG problems. Add in a few billion more people and any 20kW future is apocalyptic. 20kW is obscene and if you think a lifestyle based on that level of wanton waste can be sustained without forcing many others in other places and other times to suffer you are deluded.