141–150 of 271 posts
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I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
We have to. The alternative is destroying the earth even more. And overall, the lifetime environmental impact of solar panels is much lower than producing the same energy using fossile fuels.
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I think the new question then becomes, can we make enough solar panels for everyone without destroying the Earth?
A more pertinent question is possibly can we make enough storage to smooth the supply sufficiently to allow adoption of solar as the principal electricity supply technology. Seems like we're going to need to become more diurnal and more seasonal in our approach to industry? Make hay while the sun shines, as the idiom says.
Hydrogen is hard to store, but there is sufficient space for satisfying most of our needs by itself. Hydrogen generators are also mostly made of iron, carbon, and aluminum, or alternatively a lot of organic chemicals and aluminum.
Pumped hydro has some problems to compete on the open market, but it also can satisfy most of our storage requirements by itself. Pumped hydro systems are made mostly of steel.
What kinds of resources do you expect we to run out of?
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I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn…
You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.
This idea that you need to have your lights on all night is rather recent. For a very very long time people survived by following the natural rythms of daylight. Some people even think this is healthier, and suggest special apps to adjust screen brightness to follow natural light patterns.
A good fridge/freezer should hold its cold overnight, especially if you aren't snacking at midnight.
So while it might be true that your current lifestyle is based on 24/7 electricity, but what makes that lifestyle sacrosanct? You'll probably change it over the next few years anyway, and odds are it is different today than it was 5 years ago.
GDP is still very much almost exactly correlated to energy consumed. Current inflation is also almost directly caused by energy loss. At this point people should not read any narratives. Look at direct physical evidence and do the math.
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They are, as a sibling comment demonstrates, deluded, after decades of being maliciously lied to by 'environmental' movements with ties to the fossil industry. Anyone against nuclear is a shill for petrochemical power, there are no exceptions. There are the deluded and the liars, that's it.
Completely disagree. And I used to be strong nuclear proponent until 2015 or so. Nuclear power is no longer a viable pathway for a government to throw tax dollars at, and there are multiple reasons: 1) Nuclear power is not cost effective: Even right now, nuclear power is more expensive (LCOE) than solar or wind. 2) Nuclear power costs explode if the capacity factor of your plants decreases: Meaning that they are basi…
I'll be casting my vote with the skeptics for this one. That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures. My inner cynic sees headlines like the above and assumes that A) the writer/publish…
Even in the face of slowing population growth? That's the primary driver of increased consumption, and population growth has slowed dramatically. > If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink? But would it? Such a transition would create a mas…
I disagree. My suspicion is that the primary driver is marketing, telling people that happiness and self-realizations comes from what you buy rather than what you give/create.
My argument is better made by Adam Curtis in "The Century of the Self" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self which documents marketing over the 20th century.
The basic thesis is that the industrial revolution was so successful at producing goods that it produced more than people were willing to buy. It took tremendous effort to convince people that they should consume more.
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You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.
I keep hearing that a problem with solar is that it doesn't work at night. So I can see that as a (solvable) problem for industry, but for personal life? This idea that you need to have your lights on all night is rather recent. For a very very long time people survived by following the natural rythms of daylight. Some people even think this is healthier, and suggest special apps to adjust screen brightness to follow…
People have used fire, candles for a very very long time to provide light at night.
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Yes. Quite easily, the materials are common. They require energy to process and ship, but that does not have to come from fossil fuels. I'm confident we'll get there. There will be lots of mitigating the damage from climate change, because that train wreck is still in motion. But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century.
> But we will mostly decarbonize our economies by the end of this century. Unfortunately unless we completely decarbonize by the middle of the century, we'll reach catastrophic levels of global warming (>3 degrees warming, likely leading to the polar ice caps melting and significant ocean level rises, especially at the equator).
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I was skeptical until I saw how good my sun panels work. We only have installed about 50% of capacity and they generate enough to cover 120% of our annual electric usage. Everything here is electric except the heating and I work from home all day (with an energy-drinking PC set-up). I live in The Netherlands - the same panels will generate about 2x as much energy a year if they were in Spain or North Africa. I wouldn…
You might be generating 120% but what happens if everybody installs? Do you have storage installed to smooth out the dead hours? Unfortunately the answer is that you need days of storage for solar and wind to be anywhere near 100% of the energy mix. The cost of that is astronomical.
He’s found that for the NEM grid in Australia at least, just six hours of storage can bring us to over 99% of demand being provided by renewables and storage over a month, almost every month. On a weekly basis, some weeks it’s 100%, but worst case will be something like two or three percent being provided by something like gas turbines over the week.
We have more pumped hydro coming online and will have more in the future, so not all those six or so hours worth will be chemical batteries.
Part of what makes this work is because on the eastern seaboard, often it might be, for example, windy in northern Queensland while it’s calm in South Australia, so being interconnected helps a lot. At this point we really don’t have (and it’s not simulating) any kind of serious demand management (apart from in emergencies, but I’m talking everyday kind of management), which could potentially remove some of the need for gas peaking. We also don’t have any offshore wind yet (legislation only legalised it last year and there are some early projects). As some of that offshore generation comes online with better capacity factors than onshore, it will likely make things more consistent.