121–130 of 317 posts
But it is so damn HOT there. And Australia has the most vicious animals and plants too. It is like an alien continent.
Yes, I’m on the city fringe. Like millions of others here.
So just to fantasize for a bit, Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely. Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free? Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail? I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say…
The ambient vibe of our time, and here on HN, is often really pessimistic. I don't believe such pessimism is realistic. Commercial grade fusion power will come, and we should push very hard to make it happen. It will change the equations at the core of the economy and open up whole new paths for technology -- far beyond the pure digital.
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A friend of mine is trying to build a house in a remote area of Southern California. He's planning to be completely "off-grid", generating power exclusively from solar. However, local regulators insist he hook up to the local electric utility. Further, in order to run the electrical cables to his property (from the substation), the local fire department insists that the brush is cleared around the new electrical cabl…
It gets even crazier. Latest: he's got a lawyer that says if he plants trees on a certain percentage of his property, it can be classified as a farm, and then exempt from the power utility hook-up requirement. But that comes with its own requirements, like a well to get water and certain fencing. But yeah, keep in mind, this is all so a dude can generate his own power on his own property.
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The real price of solar electricity is never negative. Unlike something like oil wells (which really have driven the price of oil negative) you can just turn solar off. Prices have gone negative because of things like subsidies - which in the short term is a good thing IMHO - it subsidizes industries developing systems to make use of that free (but not negative cost) energy...
> you can just turn solar off Somebody has to go and turn it off, and having this person available overwhelms all of your operational costs. Or alternatively, you need the infrastructure to do it automatically, what is currently expensive. (But there aren't intrinsic reasons for that being expensive, it's probably due to lack of scale.) If it's just slightly negative, or just rarely so, it's not worth it.
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Power travels near the speed of light. In theory, the entire globe can be connected and countries with daylight can supply those at night in a cycle.
This isn't going to happen simply because it would introduce enormous strategic vulnerabilities. The first act ina war would be to sever an opponent's grid connections to their neighbors because that would massively erode their ability to maintain an orderly civil society.
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The loss is not that much - approximately 3.5% per 1000km. IIRC the Changji-Guquan HVDC line reported around 8% over 3300km thanks to working at 1100kV. Extend that to 10k km and you're looking at approximately 25%, but if it's surplus solar, who cares? Such a line costs as much as a highway broadly speaking, so it's not impossible to build.
For reference, that would give me in Maine the ability to buy power from a solar farm in Arizona or other literally unutilized deserts. Local power costs are over 30 cents per KWh, so that could be pretty competitive. The problem is that, no profit based organization will ever build "surplus" solar to enable that kind of thing. If we want surplus power, if we want a strong grid, if we want cheap power, if we want to…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco%E2%80%93UK_Powe...
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Australia will give you a 30% discount on that purchase, they have a fund of 2.3 Billion Australian dollars available for this purpose called the Cheaper Home Batteries program.
Man as someone paying a premium for power in the US, Australia is sounding really nice
Best 5 years of my life. I'm back in the US now temporarily, but there's zero doubt in my mind I will end up back in Aus. I've lived in 8 cities now(1), and Sydney was the highest quality of life I've had out of any of them. Great infrastructure, great work-life balance, great culture, and fantastic weather. Only downsides are the distance and the lack of ozone layer (do not fuck around with the sun in Australia - there's a reason why they have over 10x the global average of melanoma). Happy to answer any questions about it or the process for getting citizenship.
(1) Cities lived for comparison: San Diego, LA, Honolulu, San Jose, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Sydney
So just to fantasize for a bit, Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely. Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free? Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail? I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say…
So just to fantasize for a bit, Suppose fusion power becomes a thing, and after handwaiving some issues let's assume it can power everything indefinitely. Does that make things like heating, cooling, travel, ocean desalination, bandwidth, AI, Bitcoin mining, permanently free? Shouldn't all of humanity be homing in on that holy grail? I read here and there that geothermal could be the next best thing. Maybe HN can say…
Then some very rich and powerful people become very unrich and unpowerful. And they could never let that happen willingly.
What's cooler than being a billionaire? A SPACE BILLIONAIRE.