151–160 of 842 posts
Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?
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The good news is that humanity has saved up a few trillion for emergencies. The bad news is that it's been saved up and hidden in tax havens. Pity
High taxes always drive capital away into unproductive tax havens. Reagan's achievement was to eliminate tax shelters in exchange for lower tax rates. This pulled the investment out of those unproductive shelters into productive activities, leading to the prosperity of the 80s.
Many of our current problems can be traced back to changes which occurred in the 70s and 80s.
Yes, prosperity on GDP numbers, blessed be Its name. Unfortunately not everything is reduced to making line go up.
Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.
We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.
Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.
Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.
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Just to add to this conversation a bit, did you know Singapore is running power wires to gather solar from Australia? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia-Asia_Power_Link
""" The AAPowerLink is being developed by the Singaporean firm Sun Cable and is projected to begin construction in mid-2023 """ Being developed
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The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly v…
Land in a desert can cost as little as a few hundred dollars per acre, so it's far from being a dominant factor. And in other places solar is often a secondary use of the land.
In general, increasing the concentration of any product in a closed system requires net energy input across the system boundary. Larger increases in concentration need more energy input than smaller increases of concentration. Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy input requirement wit…
In fact this theoretical minimum is not very high; as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture#Environment... explains, it is only 250 kWh/tonne CO₂, or 900 kJ/kg in SI units. To remove the ≈60 Gt/year of anthropogenic CO₂ currently being emitted and get us to carbon-neutral with direct air capture would consequently require a theoretical minimum of 1.7 terawatts, which is only about 10% of current world marketed energy consumption, and presumably about 5% of world marketed energy consumption 10 years from now. Kicking climate change into reverse would require a bit more than that, maybe double. Depending on the sorbent system, this energy can be solar thermal; it does not have to be electrical.
Existing direct air capture systems like Climeworks's do not closely approach the theoretical minimum. Do you know how much energy they require?
Point source capture is of course much cheaper but it cannot get us to net negative CO₂ emissions.
We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are. For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there…
You could satisfy the world current demand for energy by covering 0.08% of the Sahara Desert with nuclear power plants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same author has a really good blog article with the math showing that it's cheaper to build solar locally in places with poor insolation than it is to build high voltge DC lines to bring it in from sunnier places. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2020/12/27/the-future-of-...
The author is making the classic mistake of assuming exponential trends continue indefinitely. Solar installs are becoming dominated by non solar panel costs. Some of those can continue to get cheaper, but land costs for example aren’t dropping. As to long distance power transmission and solar, it’s less about local vs long distance transmission of power but redundancy of generation. Batteries you discharge nightly v…
I could theoretically go out and buy a pallet load of twenty, 360W rated, 72 cell panels at something like $160 per piece, costing something like $3,200 + $400 LTL freight. But it's going to cost way more than that to put those 20 on my roof or ground mounts and make them useful.
The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it. Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming mo…
Would you tell an animal that? What about bacteria?
I think the optimistic view is fashion is cyclical and the contrary will become fashionable again.