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The degree to which we’ve been blessed with resources and opportunity to do the right thing (and have consistently chosen to do the dumb thing) never fails to a
by matthewdgreen 4y ago
The degree to which we’ve been blessed with resources and opportunity to do the right thing (and have consistently chosen to do the dumb thing) never fails to amaze me. Infinite power from the sky that’s cheaper than fossil fuels; vast reserves of lithium to help oil-producing nations smoothly transition us away from oil; huge and unusually-enriched Uranium deposits we could use to build power (but instead used to build bombs) etc. It’s easy to see where the Garden of Eden parable came from.
- redeeman 4y ago> Infinite power from the sky that’s cheaper than fossil fuels but it isnt though, if it was, it would be happening all over, without massive subsidies and strongarming from government.
- ag315 4y agoCorrect--while the sun sends an enormous amount of free energy our way, it's maddeningly diffuse and requires enormous investments of energy and materials to capture it in a usable and reliable form. The Wynn in Vegas has a 160 acre solar farm in some of the sunniest land in the country and it provides...almost enough energy to power a single large hotel. None of this is to say that solar power is bad, just that we should have measured expectations.
- causi 4y ago1,370 watts per square meter isn't what I'd call diffuse. We're just not good at harvesting it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ArnoVW 4y agoA typical nuclear station genrates 1 Gw. You'd need 1000000 square meters (=1000 sq km) to generate the same thing. Oh and we can only capture 20-30 % of the energy of the total light. We're going to need solar power, and fossile fuel is madness. But to deny that solar power is not 'dense' seems irrational.
- fhars 4y ago1000000 square meters are one square kilometer. Which is probably only about ten times the area required to build a nuclear power plant.
- epistasis 4y agoDense is a subjective term, and solar is without a doubt a dense enough energy source. Compare the amount of land needed to power the US with solar to the amount we use to brew a small amount of ethanol as a minor energy sourced. We can completely power the US with a fraction of the land that we currently use as a subsidy for corn farmers, who grow more corn than we can eat.
- ag315 4y agoWhile I'm less optimistic than you on solar power, you're absolutely right about ethanol, which is easily one of the worst and most inefficient power sources we could have possibly chosen to invest in. It's a significant indictment of the US political system that so much money was shoveled into it.
- causi 4y ago1000000 square meters is one square kilometer, not one thousand. It's also less than half the acreage used by my local nuclear power plant.
- Schroedingersat 4y ago
- ag315 4y ago1370/sq km is at the atmospheric level. The amount that actually reaches the surface is significantly less.
- causi 4y agoSignificantly less, but not debilitatingly less. For a panel in direct sunlight and adjusted to point directly at the sun, the ground value is 1,050 watts per square meter.
- myshpa 4y agoJust 254x254 km of solar panels should be enough for the whole world. https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/institut/system/projects/Ecobalance_of_a_Solar_Electricity_Transmission.pdf https://www.dlr.de/tt/Portaldata/41/Resources/dokumente/inst... - page 25
- bitxbitxbitcoin 4y agoEspecially if it were close enough to the sun to start making a cube!
- geysersam 4y agoThat must be a seriously energy hungry hotel! 160 acres are 1x1.6 kilometers. That should give about 150 MW during the day. (Same as power consumption of 50 000 aircons.)
- j_maffe 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_subsidies
- HPsquared 4y agoThere is some highly suspect ontology here. These are mostly generic tax reductions for energy, and would apply equally to solar or any other energy source. For example in the UK, "fuel and power for domestic use" is subject to the reduced VAT rate of 5%, instead of the standard rate of 20% charged for most items. This is the kind of thing that gets labelled a "fossil fuel subsidy".
- redeeman 4y agoit is a special(well I wish) kind of thinking where EVERYTHING belongs to the government, so the notion that someone gets to keep more of their own produce can only mean subsidy. It is really quite sick when one thinks about it
- epistasis 4y agoThis is a lot like saying, in 1995, that if the internet was going to be a useful thing to society, then everybody would already be using it. Utilities are slow. And not so bright. They are using old technology that hasn't changed for decades, has reached its peak, and doesn't advance. Utilities are conservative. If something new comes out and is better, it's going to take them a decade to even realize what's happening. Then it's going to take decades for the old multi-decade existing equipment to age out. And if the technology is cheaper, there's a very good chance that utilities will heavily resist providing cheaper electricity because in many markets they are regulated monopolies, with a fixed rate of profit. Cheaper energy prices mean less profit. In reality, solar is cheaper energy today. Providing 99% of our energy by solar, wind, geothermal, and storage is cheaper than our current energy mix in California: https://energycentral.com/c/cp/our-path-247-renewable-energy-2025 https://energycentral.com/c/cp/our-path-247-renewable-energy... And nationwide in the US, it's cheaper to shut down a paid-for coal plant and replace it with solar than to continue buying fuel: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30012023/wind-solar-coal-power-plant-costs/ https://insideclimatenews.org/news/30012023/wind-solar-coal-... And year after year, solar, wind, and storage get cheaper, and we have not yet reached the inflection point of the logistic curve yet. The genera form of Moore's law is Wright's law, and it applies to renewable energies, and is no longer in effect for fossil fuel tech.
- rr888 4y agoUtilities are huge financial organzations that have to provide secure generation and transportation over decades. Just because solar is cheaper now doesn't mean you can replace everything in just a few years. Also Solar might work great in California but Nebraska not so much.
- epistasis 4y ago> Also Solar might work great in California but Nebraska not so much If you think that solar doesn't work fantastically in Nebraska, then I think you need to reevaluate the data, and start holding your utility to account. Solar works great in Minnesota, with lower solar resources than Nebraska. The key difference is whether the utility will allow a financially beneficial decision to made, not the fundamental economics of the technology. Contrast the planned 2023 solar additions in yellow dots on this map: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=50818 With the amount of solar insolation (note that the color gradient only spans a ~30-40% overall difference, too): https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018-usa-scale-01.jpg https://www.nrel.gov/gis/assets/images/solar-annual-ghi-2018... So while you are right that utilities are slow, which was the main thrust of my original comment, we must also acknowledge the financial incentives of utilities to distort a setup that can not even result be called a market. Electricity decisions are made based on what the utility perceives will give it the greatest profit, with all their biases, and without regard to what will deliver the best overall cost-optimal solution for reliable power.
- JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago> > The degree to which we’ve been blessed with resources and opportunity to do the right thing (and have consistently chosen to do the dumb thing) never fails to amaze me It’s the curse of natural resources. When you have “the stuff” you feel like you don’t need to talk to others, spending time and human resources on talks and diplomatic relationships. In the context of global politics, military and intelligence where everyone’s ego is all the way up their ass, not wanting to talk is interpreted as disrespect and hostility. And so tension ensues, add the language barrier, culture barrier etc. and pretty soon you are stuck with the old USvTHEM Another country similar to that is Venezuela, they too have plenty of fossil fuels and sun and lithium.
- ren_engineer 4y agothat curse doesn't hurt the US, Canada, Australia, Norway, or many other resource rich nations
- nine_k 4y agoIt's almost as if some cultural mechanism was there in place to limit the public display of ego. Some kind of religion maybe?
- MagicMoonlight 4y agoNah the garden of eden comes from an extinction event where almost all humans were wiped out. The only survivors were trapped in a small piece of fertile land at the equator and everything else was solid ice. It would be easy to see that garden as a gift from god after you’ve seen everyone else freeze to death. Then you just need a reason to leave e.g overhunting or overpopulation or some dispute. Then the myth would be that someone living there did something and our group had to leave paradise and go into the thawing wasteland. Pass that on for generation after generation and it becomes metaphorical.
- canadianfella 4y ago[dead]
- photochemsyn 4y agoI'd guess the 'Garden of Eden' as referenced in the Abrahamic religious traditions might have been in today's Sahara: > "Paleoclimate and archaeological evidence tells us that, 11,000-5,000 years ago, the Earth's slow orbital 'wobble' transformed today's Sahara desert to a land covered with vegetation and lakes." https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/green-sahara-african-humid-periods-paced-by-82884405/ https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/green-saha... If you're referencing the likely near-extinction of humans ~74,000 years ago, it's not clear anyone in the relatively recent past would have remembered that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- kwere 4y agoSpeculation: The Eden parable came "probably" from the mesopotamic delta which thousand of years ago was in the middle of persian gulf (average depth: 50m) as sea levels were lower and whatever civilization/population was there had to migrate to norther and drier places when sea levels raised (even quickly with waterpulse-1a/b/c)[0] [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meltwater_pulse_1B
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- swamp40 4y agoI had always thought the Garden of Eden was mapped to the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq.
- reducesuffering 4y agoAccurate or not, there is a "Tree of Knowledge" where the Tigris and Euphrates meet https://goo.gl/maps/GQjs6LcHsmVdxH5k6 https://goo.gl/maps/GQjs6LcHsmVdxH5k6
- panick21_ 4y agoThorium is literally in the ground all around everywhere and incredibly cheap to extract, basically free. And yet we don't use it. If we did, we wouldn't really need that much lithium.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoCan you share a link to a battery chemistry based on thorium that I can buy?
- panick21_ 4y agoMy point is that if you have nuclear plants that can dispatch power on demand based on demand, there is far less need grid scale store. And if you build on electric trains and trams, rather then EV you can likely reduce the amount of lithium a society needs by 80%.