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

arstechnica.com

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

#171

Post by 05 »

jmyeet wrote: post #117
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…

There’s an effort to whitewash the horrors of chattel slavery that is really disgusting. Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves. This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners. There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more…

> We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.

Yeah, but not for the reasons you think. A country that would just kill a significant share of its citizens for something that used to be legal very recently is not going to end up just fine. Moreover, due to normal distribution of human traits the next generation would have the same percentage of 'evil' with or without your well-intentioned genocide.. go figure.

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

#172

Post by bb88 »

paxys wrote: post #47
tmellon2 wrote: post #35

Elon Musk mentioned that just a 100 square mile grid of Solar can power the entire USA. I did not believe it; a simple calculation later, I was convinced. The USA of yesteryear would have done this already and more. Sure other sources are required, but honestly we humans have to advance beyond burning dead things for fuel.

Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2. Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.

Currently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms.

Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.

The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.

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

#173

Post by inglor_cz »

05 wrote: post #157
inglor_cz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka

Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity?

I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp.

OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh.

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

#174

Post by arcade79 »

tialaramex wrote: post #71
whatever1 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gasoline might be on decline (but the gas car fleet will take decades to turn over), but for literally everything else there is no viable alternative. Trucks, ships, airplanes, freight trains, even heating for older buildings. So no, we need our refineries for a good part of this century. Likely we will keep just the integrated ones (chemical + fuels).

In several countries their freight trains are electric today. Trucks can be electric too, and a lot of shipping needn't run on fossil fuels although we're further off widespread commercial offerings than we are for trains or trucks which you can just buy today. The main obstacle is aeroplanes, so that's Jet-A aka Kerosene as fuel, but even then if the numbers get nasty the airlines will kill a lot of services rather…

Given the rapid expansion of solar, and that it keeps accellerating, we're less than 10 years away from seeing a massive decline in demand for gasoline.

I don't know the chemistry, and whether that'll make more hydrocarbons available for creating Jet-A, but I do expect that there will be massive overproduction of gasoline - and if price is left to market demand, it'll drop.

It won't get cheaper than solar though.

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

#175

Post by chasd00 »

jeffbee wrote: post #73
paxys wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 100 sq miles but 100 mile x 100 mile, which is 10,000 sq miles. And that assumes peak efficiency. Factoring in degredation you'd have to multiply this by 2. Not "just" by any stretch of the imagination. This is larger than Rhode Island and Lake Erie combined. Aka a pipe dream. Might as well "just" build a dyson sphere while we are at it.

10k square miles of photovoltaic power plant would cost about 1 trillion current US dollars, even assuming that such a project does not drive the cost down. This is easily achievable and roughly 20 orders of magnitude cheaper than a Dyson sphere.

that's a very nice target to cause a country wide blackout, just saying. It's probably better to built a thousand 10 square mile power plants.

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

#176

Post by ceejayoz »

inglor_cz wrote: post #169
ceejayoz wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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

Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit.

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

There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South.

> 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.

What we'd now call the developed world.

That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird.

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

#177

Post by cucumber3732842 »

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?

>I have a goal of setting up solar on my property in the woods that goes directly to a wall of batteries,

>Does anybody have suggestions or advice on how to do this?

Pay a land use consultant or lawyer $500-$1k to go over you idea with you. There is a reason you do not see people DIYing land development that is not residential. You will likely find that the least terrible way to do what you're asking is to build some sort of minimal cabin or something to get the whole project to be residential. Even then you will likely have to dial back your clearing a lot and structure the project in multiple phases over many years to not incur non-starter level costs.

You're gonna learn more about the clean water act than you ever wanted to know.

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

#178

Post by testing22321 »

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…

It depends how you look at it

> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna

China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.

So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.

Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime

(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)

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

#179

Post by TacticalCoder »

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 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.

I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.

Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).

At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).

"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".

HN is truly lost.

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

#180

Post by mikestew »

wang_li wrote: post #141
JuniperMesos wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What specific educational test would you like to see for someone to be legally eligible to vote in some jurisdiction? SAT score higher than a certain threshold (what specific threshold?). What if huge numbers of people cheat on the test in order to be able to legally vote? What if instead the educational criteria is a degree from some credited educational institution? Who decides what institutions will be authorized…

I'm not saying you have to have a certain level of education to vote, I'm saying you have to have a certain level of functional ability to not be incarcerated for the rest of your life. Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level. Voting yourself other people's stuff would be that the safety net is bare minimum to keep people who are going through unexpected issues alive. But no on…

Such as you have to be able to read and write and do math at some certain level.

Yes, we should implement this as it’s never been tried before! Oh, wait…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_test#Voting

Perhaps instead of reading’, writing, and ‘rithmetic, maybe we should test one’s knowledge of history, eh?

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