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Hospitals can also just run on the sunny days. Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial
by noosphr 2mo ago
Hospitals can also just run on the sunny days.
Renewable energy only makes sense in a society that is agrarian. The second you have to make anything industrial you need baseload. That baseload can either be coal or nuclear.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- skrause 2mo agoIn modern times you combine solar energy with wind power and batteries and you already have 90% of the load covered. Then combine that with cheap, easily adjustable gas power plants to complete the picture for cloudy, windless winter days. There's really no need for coal or nuclear power plants anymore.
- noosphr 2mo agoIf you run a washing machine sure. If you need to run an industrial process, not so much.
- throwaway473825 2mo agoBuilding gas power plants that run only a few weeks per year is very expensive. Just compare prices in Germany (gas) with China (coal) or Finland (nuclear). A more economical way would be to build nuclear power plants that power electrolyzers most of the time and provide power to the grid when necessary. In the US, gas power plants make more sense due to ridiculously cheap gas, but even then the capacity factor of those power plants is much higher than 10%.
- sensanaty 2mo agoOr we can turn off the net negative data centers in order to keep our Hospitals running smoothly, rather than taking the entire grid down so some psychopaths in Silicon Valley can LARP at creating their silicon God.
- psolidgold 2mo agoComparing 24/7 AI training to operating hospitals 24/7 is a bit of a false equivalency, don't you think? Besides, hydroelectric is commonly used as baseload where available. Additionally, there are big strides happening in power storage options to smooth the effective baseload of solar and wind. I would argue that coal energy only makes sense in an anachronistic society doomed to fail.
- noosphr 2mo agoWhere available is limited to Norway. Building enough mountains per capita in the rest of the world is somewhat difficult.
- psolidgold 2mo agoYou've been confidently wrong a couple times now - or maybe intentionally misrepresenting the facts? In the US there are several states where hydro is the majority source of baseload electricity: Washington, Idaho, Vermont, Oregon, etc. Outside of the US there are several countries that source more than 90% of their electricity from hydro - at higher percentages than Norway even: Paraguay, Albania, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Namibia, Zambia, Tajikistan. You also don't have to build mountains to utilize hydro. There are areas that are utilizing pumped hydro to store the kinetic energy to smooth the baseline.
- noosphr 2mo agoI've worked in energy and ran the numbers. Renewables only make sense for a pre industrial or deindustrializing society. When you need power to make shit they are useless. Which is why the industrial revolution moved from water to coal in the first place.
- psolidgold 2mo agoOh you ran the numbers!? If only you had led with that. Even China has seen a stark reduction in the percentage of electricity generated from coal plants over the past decade. Are they deindustrializing? Everyone knows coal is a dead end. Maybe you should run the numbers again.
- pibaker 2mo agoUnplug a ventilator for five minutes and a patient dies. If unplugging a data center for five minutes can have a similar effect, then every AWS or cloudflare outage would have been a mass extinction event.