Everyone talks about how many lives climate change will ruin, but not enough talk about how many lives are lifted out of poverty from energy abundance from fossil fuels.
Why not both? It's not a dichotomy.
Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
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Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#12I am flabbergasted how much governments, media and institutions lie to the public about the feasibly of wind and solar as a replacement for fossil fuels.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#13The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas peaker plants during heat waves), but this blog post is a lot of complicating noise in what is a fairly simple economics of implementation problem.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#14During the current situation I learned an interesting thing about nuclear power plants: if you bomb them, the amount of radioactivity that will be released into atmosphere because of waste products storage on site is vastly larger than the one that would be released by a nuclear explosion in a random place.
Because unfortunately most nuclear waste is stored on site because of the NIMBY problem.
So every nuclear power plant is a giant liability in case of conflict.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#15I recently heard (on HN, maybe you did too) about a form of energy that sounds pretty utopian to me. Ultra deep bore geothermal. Geothermal has been around for a long time and has problems like causing earthquakes and needing very specific geological formations that only exist in certain places. But these limitations are mostly due to the fact that we can't bore that deep. Geothermal energy exists under every point o…
Ultra deep bore geothermal is a science project right now.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#16I don't really understand his conclusion. If I understand it correctly, it boils down to: Fossil fuels are cheaper (better ROI) than renewables, therefore changes/improvements to fossil fuels did more to reduce CO2 than renewables. My work on "utopian energy" didn't have the effect I wished it had.
Climate change is a problem. Just because gas, oil, and coal are cheaper and made improvements doesn't change a thing about that.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#17When you realize it's usually not a physics or even economic problem, but a social problem.
The main social issue is that green energy is better used as marketing than to really do something about the ever rising levels of emissions. After all, most people don't care to read the actual facts on supposedly new, superior technology, they just endorse it because it's supposed to be green.
Cynical me says it's a big money maker / captialism; green energy projects receive billions in subsidies. At one point you could get "green energy" from your electricity provider at a few cents / kWh extra which they would (supposedly) invest in green energy projects. Then green energy became a marketing term at no extra cost.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#18The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…
>The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close.
So what? Or put another way, if its so cheap, why is Germany building natural gas pipelines to ship Russian gas for decades to come? What do they (and every other country) know that you don't?
The reality is you're not comparing apples to apples. Natural gas can serve as base load and power a modern economy. Solar/wind can't - doesn't matter if they are free. They can't.
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#19I recently heard (on HN, maybe you did too) about a form of energy that sounds pretty utopian to me. Ultra deep bore geothermal. Geothermal has been around for a long time and has problems like causing earthquakes and needing very specific geological formations that only exist in certain places. But these limitations are mostly due to the fact that we can't bore that deep. Geothermal energy exists under every point o…
Ah… Moria. The dwarves delved too greedily and too deep…
Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life
#20I gave up on this when I realized that nuclear was perceived as the worst source of energy by both the people and the people in charge, while I don't see any other better alternative to help us out.