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Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

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Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#191

Post by louwrentius »

In Star Trek The Next Generation, energy is a 'solved problem'. Material needs are also a 'solved problem'.

Money doesn't exist anymore.

I think at least 70% of the Hacker News crowd would hate this world because they would have no idea what to do with their life under these circumstances.

What is life about except turning a profit? How can you have power over other people? Feel important with all your money? Look at Elon, he's happy.

(They probably would become Ferengi).

Maybe people can learn something from the anarchist David Graeber.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#192

Post by Gravityloss »

kragen wrote: post #184
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their…

There's at least one HVDC cable connected to Netherlands, Norned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NorNed .

As probably everyone knows, Netherlands is very flat and Norway very mountaneous. Norways is also very rainy. So it's a match made in heaven - Norway's mountain reservoirs can act as balancers for dutch wind power.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#193

Post by lukan »

kragen wrote: post #184
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

Plausible alternatives to cables include ships full of synthetic diesel, ships full of iron, ships full of aluminum, or ships full of magnesium. Inside China HVDC cables are indeed carrying solar power across the continent, but the Netherlands have not managed to erect any yet. Cables provide efficient JIT power delivery, but they're vulnerable to precision-guided missiles, which Ukrainians are 3-D printing in their…

Ships carrying energy are a pretty easy explosive target as well.

Local ressilence is needed in any case and mass produced batteries can provide that safety.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#194

Post by VBprogrammer »

DesertVarnish wrote: post #143
VBprogrammer wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion. Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life. At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this p…

Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis. Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s. Some places with very cheap to extract…

Terraform Industries (and others); I'd seriously consider taking a long bet that these companies turn out to be better at converting investor capital into employee salaries, for a finite period of time, than they are at converting atmospheric CO2 into natural gas.

If such a technology was possible then it would be far better to start with carbon capture from existing emitters. The concentration of CO2 being easily 3 orders of magnitude higher.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#195

Post by VBprogrammer »

ben_w wrote: post #159
HPsquared wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even with free electricity, the capital (and maintenance, consumables etc) costs of the process could easily be too high.

I suppose that in principle that is indeed possible; in practice, trees exist and self-seed, so the limit is our own ignorance.

You could make the same argument about AGI. Just because nature does it doesn't mean it's easy for us to replicate in an industrial setting.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#196

Post by msgodel »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #133
Biologist123 wrote: post #53

This was a great positive start to the day. Thanks whoever posted that. One point curious in its omission is whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget. Presumably that’s the critical metric in all of this. [Edit: I ran this question through ChatGPT and the initial (unvalidated) response wasn’t so exciting. This obviously put a dampener on my mood. And I wondered why people like McKi…

Solar and wind are booming, but fossil fuels aren't shrinking nearly as fast in absolute terms

Usually old energy sources don't go away until there's an economic contraction of some sort.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#197

Post by jillesvangurp »

buckle8017 wrote: post #183
jillesvangurp wrote: post #175

The article doesn't mention a technology that deserves some attention because it counters the biggest and most obvious deficiency in solar: the sun doesn't always shine. That technology is cables. Cables allow us to move energy over long distances. And with HVCD cables that can mean across continents, oceans, time zones, and climate regions. The nice things about cables is that they are currently being underutilized.…

Better grid connections helps with variable weather but it does nothing for solar biggest down side. Seasonal variation from December to May is enormous. Storing months of power is a problem with no known solution.

North south connections enable solar power from Africa to be used around the year. And while solar is down in the winter, wind production usually peaks. If you have thousands of km of cable, there is a lot of power that can be moved around.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#198

Post by ben_w »

overfeed wrote: post #190
ben_w wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose that in principle that is indeed possible; in practice, trees exist and self-seed, so the limit is our own ignorance.

We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.

People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.

This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.

A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#199

Post by seydor »

ErigmolCt wrote: post #132

While the US is busy trying to revive the oil-soaked 20th century, places like Namibia are leapfrogging straight into a distributed, solar-powered future with YouTube tutorials... It's like watching the fossil era get out-hustled in real time.

To be fair the US is leading the world in solar and wind per capita

EDIT: energy consumption from renewables, not installed capacity

https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/energy?tab=chart&hideCo...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-solar?tab=char...

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-electricity-per-capi...

Re: Solar power has begun to transform the world’s energy system

#200

Post by vrx-meta »

lordofgibbons wrote: post #187
rpozarickij wrote: post #179

> Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines. It's interesting to realize that the vast majority of the energy used by humans comes from the sun (with the exception of nuclear and geothermal energy). Even hyd…

All fossil fuels also come from the sun!

The nuclear fuels are also probably from the Sun. Pretty much everything is the Sun.
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