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For the same reason solar panels aren't going to stop people from drilling and sucking up every last drop of oil.

alt227 2y ago
What, that they are intermittant, dont work for over 50% of the time, and cant handle the immediate peaks required on a national/international grid?
- zeristor 2y ago
  That’s what grid battery storage is for, obviously.
  - alt227 2y ago
    Yeah, except a battery to hold enough energy to cover the entire planets energy spikes would be some battery.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      See, what you do is charge up the atmosphere as a 'battery' (capacitor). /Tesla Non-chemical batteries, flywheels and hydroelectric storage green hydrogen and such other ways of storing energy as we can come up with are certainly part of the solution.
- IshKebab 2y ago
  I think he was alluding to plastic.
- os2warpman 2y ago
  If you look at it from a systems perspective, battery storage is the same as increasing/decreasing steam output or drawing from a steam bank to match demand and the diurnal nature of solar is the same as taking units offline for maintenance. The durations, scale, and reaction times to changing conditions are different (sometimes worse, sometimes better) but the concept is the same. We solved those problems before, and have already solved them with solar it's just a matter of building out the infrastructure. We may have to shed a single digit percentage of "market efficiency" in the short term to ensure the future of humanity, though, so there is resistance.
  - alt227 2y ago
    You are correct. we have indeed solved some of these issues, we have even built incredible solutions such as Electric Mountain in Wales[0] to store and release incredible amounts of energy almost immediately. However this just serves to prove my point. Even an entire lake being flushed down a mountain is not enough to offset all the peaaks in just the UK, a relatively small country. To solve this issue on a global scale enough to provide the worlds power from solar is an unthinkable challenge IMO. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
    - jessekv 2y ago
      To be fair UK has the unique problem where everyone starts their electric tea kettle all at the same time... Makes me wonder if you can smooth out certain peaks by introducing individualised random delays in the television programming ;)
      - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
        We've effectively done that with streaming on-demand programming and local storage allowing pausing of OTA programming. Also, Octopus Energy is now the UKs largest provider, they have tariffs with variable rates (demand-based pricing). Very occasionally you can be paid to use electricity. That's certainly encourages some users away from boiling the kettle at peak times.
hinkley 2y ago
Right now the amount of energy it takes to extract every gallon of oil from the ground is creeping up decade by decade. So you end up having to consume your own supply to make it fit for consumers. I can see a day where solar powered refineries exist. Either under their own power or by being grid-tied. But there will come a time when it’s just too expensive to pull it up from many places and we end up with dozens of wells and optimize cracking for petrochemicals other than fuel.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
The people that have that line of thinking have no idea how things are actually made. We might no burn every drop of oil. But we’re going to use it until it’s gone. “Oh maybe we won’t need the most dense and easily convertible source of hydrocarbons on our planet!”
MisterTea 2y ago
I am surprised everyone replying is solely thinking about energy when we need oil for lubricants and plastics and so on. Things we cant replace easily with organic alternatives which themselves might have environmental impacts (e.g. land and water for growing oil producing crops.)
- lazide 2y ago
  It’s relatively trivial (but more expensive than getting it straight from the ground) to synthesize oil from atmospheric components + energy. Some countries have done it at large scales during wartime.
  - salynchnew 2y ago
    This is the issue. A lot of hydocarbons can still be produced without extracting them from rocks miles under the ground, poisoning the water supply, or any of the externalities of runaway global warming. The trick is leveraging insanely cheap solar electricity to do everything else.
  - AngryData 2y ago
    The chemistry isn't that hard to produce oil from basically nothing of value, but the energy costs aren't trivial, and that means we don't need a 1:1 energy replacement from fossil fuel sources to solar panels, we need more like a 10x increase in global energy production to replace fossil fuels with solar for example. The only really feasible way to produce that much electricity renewably by this point in time or even within the next 20+ years has been nuclear energy, which the world largely turned their backs on the last few decades and left us in an even bigger hole to fill.
  - jabl 2y ago
    Which countries would that be? Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere in order to have a source of carbon is, to this day, a technology in the prototype stage. If you're thinking of Germany during WWII, or South Africa during apartheid, they produced synthetic liquid fuels from coal. That was technology that worked, though it was very expensive. And of course CO2 emissions were much higher than using petroleum.

What, that they are intermittant, dont work for over 50% of the time, and cant handle the immediate peaks required on a national/international grid?

zeristor 2y ago
That’s what grid battery storage is for, obviously.
- alt227 2y ago
  Yeah, except a battery to hold enough energy to cover the entire planets energy spikes would be some battery.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    See, what you do is charge up the atmosphere as a 'battery' (capacitor). /Tesla Non-chemical batteries, flywheels and hydroelectric storage green hydrogen and such other ways of storing energy as we can come up with are certainly part of the solution.
IshKebab 2y ago
I think he was alluding to plastic.
os2warpman 2y ago
If you look at it from a systems perspective, battery storage is the same as increasing/decreasing steam output or drawing from a steam bank to match demand and the diurnal nature of solar is the same as taking units offline for maintenance. The durations, scale, and reaction times to changing conditions are different (sometimes worse, sometimes better) but the concept is the same. We solved those problems before, and have already solved them with solar it's just a matter of building out the infrastructure. We may have to shed a single digit percentage of "market efficiency" in the short term to ensure the future of humanity, though, so there is resistance.
- alt227 2y ago
  You are correct. we have indeed solved some of these issues, we have even built incredible solutions such as Electric Mountain in Wales[0] to store and release incredible amounts of energy almost immediately. However this just serves to prove my point. Even an entire lake being flushed down a mountain is not enough to offset all the peaaks in just the UK, a relatively small country. To solve this issue on a global scale enough to provide the worlds power from solar is an unthinkable challenge IMO. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
  - jessekv 2y ago
    To be fair UK has the unique problem where everyone starts their electric tea kettle all at the same time... Makes me wonder if you can smooth out certain peaks by introducing individualised random delays in the television programming ;)
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      We've effectively done that with streaming on-demand programming and local storage allowing pausing of OTA programming. Also, Octopus Energy is now the UKs largest provider, they have tariffs with variable rates (demand-based pricing). Very occasionally you can be paid to use electricity. That's certainly encourages some users away from boiling the kettle at peak times.

hinkley 2y ago

Right now the amount of energy it takes to extract every gallon of oil from the ground is creeping up decade by decade. So you end up having to consume your own supply to make it fit for consumers. I can see a day where solar powered refineries exist. Either under their own power or by being grid-tied. But there will come a time when it’s just too expensive to pull it up from many places and we end up with dozens of wells and optimize cracking for petrochemicals other than fuel.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

The people that have that line of thinking have no idea how things are actually made. We might no burn every drop of oil. But we’re going to use it until it’s gone. “Oh maybe we won’t need the most dense and easily convertible source of hydrocarbons on our planet!”

MisterTea 2y ago

I am surprised everyone replying is solely thinking about energy when we need oil for lubricants and plastics and so on. Things we cant replace easily with organic alternatives which themselves might have environmental impacts (e.g. land and water for growing oil producing crops.)

lazide 2y ago
It’s relatively trivial (but more expensive than getting it straight from the ground) to synthesize oil from atmospheric components + energy. Some countries have done it at large scales during wartime.
- salynchnew 2y ago
  This is the issue. A lot of hydocarbons can still be produced without extracting them from rocks miles under the ground, poisoning the water supply, or any of the externalities of runaway global warming. The trick is leveraging insanely cheap solar electricity to do everything else.
- AngryData 2y ago
  The chemistry isn't that hard to produce oil from basically nothing of value, but the energy costs aren't trivial, and that means we don't need a 1:1 energy replacement from fossil fuel sources to solar panels, we need more like a 10x increase in global energy production to replace fossil fuels with solar for example. The only really feasible way to produce that much electricity renewably by this point in time or even within the next 20+ years has been nuclear energy, which the world largely turned their backs on the last few decades and left us in an even bigger hole to fill.
- jabl 2y ago
  Which countries would that be? Capturing CO2 from the atmosphere in order to have a source of carbon is, to this day, a technology in the prototype stage. If you're thinking of Germany during WWII, or South Africa during apartheid, they produced synthetic liquid fuels from coal. That was technology that worked, though it was very expensive. And of course CO2 emissions were much higher than using petroleum.