4 ms·

> With solar and wind being so competitive on price (both per MW and MWh) I don't understand why there's not more of it. You need to be a bit more patient. sol

> With solar and wind being so competitive on price (both per MW and MWh) I don't understand why there's not more of it. You need to be a bit more patient. solar / wind have been growing double digit percentages (from the top of my head something like 20-30%) p.a. now for some time. Just to compare, iPhone had never two consecutive full production years that would have had triple digit growth. And arguably increasing production capacity for energy infrastructure is more difficult than for a phone. So the 20-30% p.a. growth is likely the best we can have, and I'd argue even that is explosive. Given current growth rates, majority of electricity production should be solar/wind within the next decade or so.

Gibbon1 4y ago
California appears to building the solar equivalent of a 1GW nuke per year with no end in sight. Total electricity currently from solar is 26%. Likely to increase to 40% in five years. Lest one think that's just California being hippy dippy, Texas is on a similar trajectory.
lostlogin 4y ago
If we stopped buying all those phones, we might need less of those solar panels. It’s amazing to think how much power usage must be controlled by Apple. Any power saving they achieve on iOS has a hundreds of millions of units in the wild.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
  ...there's a decent amount of embodied carbon, but a phone uses about the same amount of energy you get from a 30cm solar panel, or about two kg of fossil fuel over a very very optimistic lifetime. Nothing it does when it's on will really alter its total lifetime emissions in any meaningful way.
  - lostlogin 4y ago
    My point wasn’t that an individual phone will do make much of a difference, it’s that a saving made by Apple and pushed out to phones has a multiplier that approaches a billion.
    - ars 4y ago
      Multiplying a tiny number by a big number is still a tiny number. The power used by every iPhone in the world is like %0.001 of power used. That saving made by Apple is just to pretend to look good - it doesn't actually make any difference.
    - Schroedingersat 4y ago
      Saving a few percent on 1 watt is a few tens of megawatts tops. You'd save orders of magnitude more by not forcing them into the trash heap with repair-hostile design, extreme fragility in the name of thinness that noone asks for and everyone immediately gets rid of with a case, and forced obsolescence via software updates

Gibbon1 4y ago

California appears to building the solar equivalent of a 1GW nuke per year with no end in sight. Total electricity currently from solar is 26%. Likely to increase to 40% in five years. Lest one think that's just California being hippy dippy, Texas is on a similar trajectory.

lostlogin 4y ago

If we stopped buying all those phones, we might need less of those solar panels. It’s amazing to think how much power usage must be controlled by Apple. Any power saving they achieve on iOS has a hundreds of millions of units in the wild.

Schroedingersat 4y ago
...there's a decent amount of embodied carbon, but a phone uses about the same amount of energy you get from a 30cm solar panel, or about two kg of fossil fuel over a very very optimistic lifetime. Nothing it does when it's on will really alter its total lifetime emissions in any meaningful way.
- lostlogin 4y ago
  My point wasn’t that an individual phone will do make much of a difference, it’s that a saving made by Apple and pushed out to phones has a multiplier that approaches a billion.
  - ars 4y ago
    Multiplying a tiny number by a big number is still a tiny number. The power used by every iPhone in the world is like %0.001 of power used. That saving made by Apple is just to pretend to look good - it doesn't actually make any difference.
  - Schroedingersat 4y ago
    Saving a few percent on 1 watt is a few tens of megawatts tops. You'd save orders of magnitude more by not forcing them into the trash heap with repair-hostile design, extreme fragility in the name of thinness that noone asks for and everyone immediately gets rid of with a case, and forced obsolescence via software updates