Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 365 posts

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#281

Post by JoeAltmaier »

maxerickson wrote: post #241
CountSessine wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, he really didn't - he said specifically, "So many, many things can be wrong and make a planet uninhabitable". What if Proxima B has chlorine in its atmosphere? Uninhabitable. Proxima B is a tidal-locked eyeball planet - what if the equatorial stable zone still shifts enough to not provide a stable environment for life? Uninhabitable. What if Proxima B encounters too much ionizing radiation? Uninhabitable. Use you…

You've managed to ignore the sentence in the post that I did reply to. You know, the other one. You've also apparently not payed much attention to Sure, we don't know a whole lot more about it, so it is quite likely to not be a nice destination for humans, but it seems to be at least remotely Earth like. that I said above (surely my making that statement implies some use of my imagination prior to your suggesting it)…

I think we're all on the same page here. Just because something is in a fortuitous orbit, there are still a thousand things that can make it miserable or uninhabitable. Even earth, aeons ago, we would have found uninhabitable. Its very likely we have evolved for exactly the earth we have. To find another anything like it is astronomically unlikely.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#282

Post by JoeAltmaier »

masklinn wrote: post #42
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If maintenance were interrupted (social upheaval) then Hoover too would fail. It take maintenance to keep it running - in particular mussels would foul and stop the turbines in a few seasons.

> If maintenance were interrupted (social upheaval) then Hoover too would fail. Probably not in your lifetime let alone in a generation. Mosul's an issue because the substrate is not suitable for dam building (it's soluble gypsum, so it just keeps eroding because dam foundations kind-of tend to be around water) so the dam has to be continuously grouted to prevent it from failing.

Add Mosul holds 2.5 million people on a floodplain. When the dam fails catastrophically, it will be a bloodbath. It'll happen in the next few years.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#283

Post by greenshackle »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #21
jfaucett wrote: post #19

Notice this is because 80% of the energy obtained was from Hydroelectric power, which is a great energy source because it is reliable - unlike wind and solar which in this case provided 7% and 0.01% respectively and are not reliable. It frustrates me that so many environmentalists are still against hydro because it alters ecosystems when nature itself is inherently violent, dangerous and in a constant state of flux.…

They can't rely 100% precisely because hydro is unreliable . A dry season and it runs down (which it did). And dams - isn't Mosul going to be destroyed soon because its dam requires constant maintenance (a clay curtain pumped into the porous bedrock) which hasn't happened since Desert Storm?

It depends. Where I'm from we run on 97% hydro power and we never run out.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#284

Post by ArkyBeagle »

quadrangle wrote: post #278
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have second-order Facebook contacts who are overt environmentalists. Some of them are self-consistent enough to actually admit that they think human population level is the root of all these problems. That is in itself probably true, but I can't quite be hypocritical enough to attack a phenomenon that supports my very existence. To that: "There are too many people." "You first." But they don't have good operating k…

Misanthropy is easy to come by when evidence supporting it is widespread. The best thing to send to anyone worried about population is: https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/

Misanthropy is dangerous.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#285

Post by jcranmer »

_ea1k wrote: post #274
ctdonath wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covering up large areas of a desert with solar panels may be more harmful than you realize. I've heard & use the term solar strip-mining . Solar power maxes out at no better than 1kW/m^2 (sun at zenith, clear day, practically 100% efficient conversion), we're talking an absolute minimum of 1 sq km to match a baseline 1GW power plant ... and likely 100 times larger for real-world scenarios (10% efficiency, night/cloud…

Why do you assume 10% efficiency? That seems awfully low? I agree with regards to rooftop being an important part, though. It makes sense to use land that is already occupied to a large degree.

The efficiency of modern commercial photovoltaic solar cells is about 10-20%.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#286

Post by hueving »

quadrangle wrote: post #276
ArkyBeagle wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A clean environment is a luxury good most people didn't even know they wanted until economies advanced enough to make them an option. To see a present-day version of this difference, one need only look at China. That's how Americans viewed the environment before WWII. If you watch the evolution of, say, the Sierra Club, its focus has shifted to reflect the changes in values over time It's very interesting. One of the…

You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.

>Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments

Except for every person living in a city. Cities were insufferable during the industrial boom.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#287

Post by ArkyBeagle »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #260
guelo wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your grandkids are less happy because you destroyed the environment in order to increase your happiness is that a negative or a positive in this philosophical framework?

My grandparents did everything within their power to "destroy" the environment, and I'm perfectly fine.

I see that we're not that familiar with various versions of the anthropic principle. Okay then.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#288

Post by ArkyBeagle »

hueving wrote: post #286
quadrangle wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.

>Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments Except for every person living in a city. Cities were insufferable during the industrial boom.

John Adams and others much like him thought cities were just dens of iniquity and filth. Since he lost a son to drink, it's no small wonder. You can only imagine the filth, crime and degradation of those places then.

Even before the Romantics, people like Jefferson considered networks of small freeholders the only sustainable way to have people live.

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#289

Post by jcranmer »

honkhonkpants wrote: post #194
ctdonath wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Covering up large areas of a desert with solar panels may be more harmful than you realize. I've heard & use the term solar strip-mining . Solar power maxes out at no better than 1kW/m^2 (sun at zenith, clear day, practically 100% efficient conversion), we're talking an absolute minimum of 1 sq km to match a baseline 1GW power plant ... and likely 100 times larger for real-world scenarios (10% efficiency, night/cloud…

> 1 sq km to match a baseline 1GW power plant Does that sound like a lot to you? A single airport runway is much larger than 1 sq km.

Uh, no. Chicago Midway happens to fit very nicely inside 1 mi² = 2.56 km². Its main runways (5 of them) with feeder ramps collectively take up at best ½ the space, so a single runway itself is not 1 km² but more like .2-.3 km².

Re: Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

#290

Post by JshWright »

ArkyBeagle wrote: post #264
Flimm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which moral worldview do you find superior? I presume you have one, because you're making a moral judgement.

All moral worldviews have defects. life isn't a ... geometry problem.

But if it were, the Rhombic Dodecahedron would be the best shape...
Post reply on HN