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Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

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Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#161

Post by ceejayoz »

inglor_cz wrote: post #146
QuercusMax wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They used slave labor too, don't forget!

Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted. When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them. In general, German occupation aut…

> Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work.

And yet, we invent things like the cotton gin, "enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation", patented in 1794.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#162

Post by hyperman1 »

ertgbnm wrote: post #22

I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…

I've read somewhere how the English people industrialized because they had problems that could not be fixed by human or animal power. Mines became too deep, pumping too hard. The ancient greek knew about steam engines, but had no use for them. The English did, in their mines. Necessity as mother of invention. Then machines freed us from hard labour and gave us free time.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#163

Post by chasd00 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #13
Wistar wrote: post #11

Related: Alec Watson’s recent, and excellent, Technology Connections YouTube piece on renewable energy. “You are being misled about renewable energy technology” https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM?si=CJ_Tt9DnWSKH8eGC

One nice thing about what’s happening is that politics are losing to reality. I’m not even sure how this became a left vs right issue in the first place (isn’t the right meant to be pro free market!?) but it doesn’t matter at this point anyway. Eg. Texas is doing really well in renewable rollouts (see the amount of battery capacity they are putting in - https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/energy-envi...…

> It’s certainly not because of Texan politics either. It’s just cold hard reality.

one of the few good things Rick Perry did for TX was upgrade the grid so West Texas wind power can reach the main cities. Once West TX showed renewables could make a profit then there's not much anyone, left or right, could do to stop it. The lobbyists made sure of that.

Southwest Texas, where all the fracking took place, also turns out to be good for solar. It's very flat, sunny, and has pretty stable weather. I guess the grid is beefed up and accessible in that region because of the oil/gas industry, I've seen solar farms out there that are so big it's hard to describe. Imagine seeing a shimmering blue that looks like a lake on the desert horizon but then you get to it and it's just miles of solar panels. Again, the moment solar turned a profit there was no stopping it.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#164

Post by cobbzilla »

hippo22 wrote: post #62
legitster wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) More or less. Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years…

[flagged]

There is certainly a cultural component. A very good book named Albion’s Seed traces the waves of early American immigration. The North was mostly settled by dissidents pre-ECW. The South was mostly divided up into estates and settled by post-ECW lords that mirrored the social structure and power dynamics they liked.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#165

Post by dyauspitr »

ertgbnm wrote: post #22

I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.) I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively un…

Why though? For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death. This probably wouldn’t work with 80% of the populace enslaved but would work very well with 10-15% enslaved.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#166

Post by ceejayoz »

irishcoffee wrote: post #145
ceejayoz wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s plenty of diesel available to us that doesn’t require stabilizing an authoritarian Central American nation and rebuilding their oil industry first.

> We're not likely to get useful oil out of Venezuela, and any we do get isn't gonna be cost-competitive against solar. I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate. I also said I don't condone it. Ignoring facts isn't helpful for anyone. Edit for ratelimiting: > You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the hist…

> I was responding to that bit. It isn't accurate.

You think it's likely that the US will manage to create a stable enough government in Venezuela for foreign investment to be successful? What in the history of American regime change efforts gives you this idea?

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/05/venezuelan-...

> The gamble is a long game, with no guarantee of success. Returning Venezuela’s crude production to 3m barrels of oil a day would require 16 years of work and investment totalling $185bn (£137bn), according to figures from Rystad Energy, a global consultancy.

> At least $30-35bn of international capital would need to be committed in the next two to three years to make this scenario plausible, Rystad said. “This could only be financed by international oil companies, which will consider investments in Venezuela only if they have full confidence in the stability of the country’s systems and its investment climate for international oil and gas players,” it added.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#167

Post by dyauspitr »

legitster wrote: post #85
hippo22 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end. Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations: > But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The…

> Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.

Human slavery might be one of the few exceptions to this. People can reproduce and create more people provided they are given the bare necessities of life. As long as you could keep the enslaved under control, you would have new slaves you could constantly sell and they mostly took care of themselves.

Honestly it sounds like a great life for an unambitious, lazy person. Maybe we’ll all be able to experience something similar when humanoid robots are commonplace in the future. Find an isolated piece of land with a few robots. Make them grow food and commercial crops. Raise some animals. Live a life of relative self sufficiency and leisure.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#168

Post by turtlebits »

elliotbnvl wrote: post #90

I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries, maybe Tesla, maybe something else. But definitely not going back into the grid. Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this? Who are the best companies doing this right now in New England? What products are folks using to store electricity? Are there any good resources for this kind of thing?

All you need is a solar charge controller and a battery, and optionally an inverter.

You dont need a company to do this for you, unless you want pay $$ to connect wires.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#169

Post by inglor_cz »

ceejayoz wrote: post #158
inglor_cz wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have? The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands. Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom,…

> Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have? Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers. > Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere. > And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the…

"Oxen? Paid laborers? "

In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that.

I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well.

But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones.

"The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere."

Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.)

And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not?

"it was at least in part cultural."

Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened.

Re: Following 35% growth, solar has passed hydro on US grid

#170

Post by cucumber3732842 »

jmyeet wrote: post #106
margalabargala wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north. That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excludi…

Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold. I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”.

It's worse than that because it takes something that should beg the question what modern things we peddle today because they make $$ are in fact morally wrong into a trite "hurr durr past people bad we smart now" that nobody learns anything from.
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