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Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of

Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US. Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction. If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM

kingleopold 7mo ago
yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
- LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
  If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?
germandiago 7mo ago
So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet? Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion. I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...
- mbesto 7mo ago
  > why it is not done yet? Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize: - It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper) - Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm - Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies
- Retric 7mo ago
  The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road. The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
  - germandiago 7mo ago
    > The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable. Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier. But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living. America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close. A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd. Just my two cents.
    - tencentshill 7mo ago
      That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
      - mullingitover 7mo ago
        Not one man, he's financially backed by the wealthiest people in the world and politically supported by millions. Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
- dylan604 7mo ago
  Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.
- idontwantthis 7mo ago
  It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).
- micromacrofoot 7mo ago
  Time, infrastructure changes take decades
- doctoboggan 7mo ago
  Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.
- bb88 7mo ago
  1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front. 2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc. 3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho) As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
  - burningChrome 7mo ago
    There was also a huge move by farmers towards growing corn and selling for ethanol because E-85 was seen as some future fuel. Many farmers I know went all in and switched from regional crops (this was in ND), such as sugar beets, soybeans, and spring wheat to corn to fuel this thinking this some kind of energy gold rush. Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms. E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
  - fhn 7mo ago
    In California, PG&E charges you for putting solar on their grid and they'll pay you a penny for your extra electricity.
  - tzs 7mo ago
    > As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies. The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food. It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.
- Aperocky 7mo ago
  It is being done, just not here.
- shepherdjerred 7mo ago
  People, especially recent American leaders, do not make rational decisions. They also have goals other than generating energy effectively
- wat10000 7mo ago
  Because externalities screw with incentives. Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form. Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard. Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
- functional_dev 7mo ago
  had the same question and after reading about it, I found there are multiple layers on each other. Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that. The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality. I found this visual schematic helpful - https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-infrastructure-incumbents-inertia https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-in...
brational 7mo ago
> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?
- wat10000 7mo ago
  Once you have enough to power the world and are able to recycle them, then you're done with extracting resources for them.
  - shawabawa3 7mo ago
    Unfortunately human energy use appears to be proportional to the amount of energy available Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises
    - wat10000 7mo ago
      It's based on cost, like anything else. If running everything on solar and batteries makes it cheaper then we'll use more. But the same is true regardless of the technology. What's not true regardless is whether a given amount of energy usage requires continual resource extraction just to sustain it, or whether it's only needed for new capacity.
- scythe 7mo ago
  It's probably fairly high, considering the existence of the sodium-sulfur battery. It's not economically competitive since it operates at high temperature, but it's based on very abundant materials.
  - ghighi7878 7mo ago
    What about salt water batteries? Seem almost commodity
- deleted 7mo ago
ethagnawl 7mo ago
> And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction. This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
baranul 7mo ago
What is really strange, at this period of history, how anyone would not think that solar makes more sense for focus and investment. Well, unless directly being paid not to use sense or care about the future of humanity, by various oil companies.

kingleopold 7mo ago

yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets

LogicFailsMe 7mo ago
If you won't think of the energy corridor, who will?

germandiago 7mo ago

So here I go: if it is so stupid, why it is not done yet? Try not to blame anyone. Do it rationally if you can, from your message I understand your opinion. I say this as a person that has lived in a developing country the last 15 years. It is not that simple IMHO...

mbesto 7mo ago
> why it is not done yet? Whoa lots to unpack here. I'll summarize: - It is already happening to some extent (it's cheaper) - Try explaining to farmers to do away with their livelihood and retrain them to running a solar farm - Entrenched bureaucracy and gov subsidies
Retric 7mo ago
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road. The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
- germandiago 7mo ago
  > The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable. Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier. But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living. America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close. A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd. Just my two cents.
  - tencentshill 7mo ago
    That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
    - mullingitover 7mo ago
      Not one man, he's financially backed by the wealthiest people in the world and politically supported by millions. Acting like this blunder is some random stroke of bad luck isn't telling the whole story.
dylan604 7mo ago
Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.
idontwantthis 7mo ago
It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).
micromacrofoot 7mo ago
Time, infrastructure changes take decades
doctoboggan 7mo ago
Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.
bb88 7mo ago
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front. 2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc. 3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho) As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
- burningChrome 7mo ago
  There was also a huge move by farmers towards growing corn and selling for ethanol because E-85 was seen as some future fuel. Many farmers I know went all in and switched from regional crops (this was in ND), such as sugar beets, soybeans, and spring wheat to corn to fuel this thinking this some kind of energy gold rush. Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms. E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
- fhn 7mo ago
  In California, PG&E charges you for putting solar on their grid and they'll pay you a penny for your extra electricity.
- tzs 7mo ago
  > As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies. The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food. It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.
Aperocky 7mo ago
It is being done, just not here.
shepherdjerred 7mo ago
People, especially recent American leaders, do not make rational decisions. They also have goals other than generating energy effectively
wat10000 7mo ago
Because externalities screw with incentives. Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form. Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard. Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
functional_dev 7mo ago
had the same question and after reading about it, I found there are multiple layers on each other. Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that. The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality. I found this visual schematic helpful - https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-infrastructure-incumbents-inertia https://vectree.io/c/why-energy-transitions-are-slow-grid-in...

brational 7mo ago

> which requires constant, continuous resource extraction Is there an upper bound on battery limits with regards to resource extraction?

wat10000 7mo ago
Once you have enough to power the world and are able to recycle them, then you're done with extracting resources for them.
- shawabawa3 7mo ago
  Unfortunately human energy use appears to be proportional to the amount of energy available Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises
  - wat10000 7mo ago
    It's based on cost, like anything else. If running everything on solar and batteries makes it cheaper then we'll use more. But the same is true regardless of the technology. What's not true regardless is whether a given amount of energy usage requires continual resource extraction just to sustain it, or whether it's only needed for new capacity.
scythe 7mo ago
It's probably fairly high, considering the existence of the sodium-sulfur battery. It's not economically competitive since it operates at high temperature, but it's based on very abundant materials.
- ghighi7878 7mo ago
  What about salt water batteries? Seem almost commodity
deleted 7mo ago

ethagnawl 7mo ago

> And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction. This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

baranul 7mo ago

What is really strange, at this period of history, how anyone would not think that solar makes more sense for focus and investment. Well, unless directly being paid not to use sense or care about the future of humanity, by various oil companies.