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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#181

Post by shp0ngle »

hedora wrote: post #36

> In order to hit the 2050 target, we therefore need to be using about 1500 TWh per year — 1% of current global energy consumption. It's infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet. It's even more infuriating now that I've read H.G. Well's "The World Set Free.", which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy ta…

well if you want to see how “let’s use less power” can look like, look at Europe this winter. Will be fun to watch.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#182

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #167
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://energi.media/news/battery-evs-more-fuel-efficient-th... .

This compares gas -> motion with battery -> motions. To close the loop, we’d have to incorporate the generation efficiency. That will still yield an impressive number, but not 5x.

Solar => Car battery you only lose about 10% of energy.

You lose more than that in refining oil to gasoline. And a lot more when factoring in extraction + transportation + point of sale.

Closing the loop makes solar => car even more efficient, not less.

Sure, if we want to be dumb and extract oil to power inefficient turbines to generate electricity this becomes a talking point. But not many people are building new oil power plants for a reason...

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#183

Post by selimthegrim »

_Microft wrote: post #43
alangibson wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, but power is Kraft.

German "Kraft"[0] as physical term means "force" in English, while "power" translates as "Leistung"[1]. [0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leistung_(Physik)

He is probably thinking in sense of “Atomkraft”

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#184

Post by geysersam »

klabb3 wrote: post #96
geysersam wrote: post #64

This is not a good take. Look at Iraq or Venezuela. No lack of energy, but plenty of poverty nonetheless.

The energy must be spent within the region to count. Those countries export it.

Why do they export it then? Because abundance of energy is not the only kind of poverty there is.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#185

Post by bottlepalm »

MrsPeaches wrote: post #86
bottlepalm wrote: post #17

In order to build systems to extract and use energy requires an educated society - that is the root deficiency. And it’s a lot more than just dropping books from airplanes.

Access to electricity is a major driver of educational attainment. 1. Access to lighting at night means students can actually do their homework. 2. Access to internet also boosts students attainment. 3. Having access to electricity means you are able to retain the best teachers as they won’t stay for long without all the mod cons. We’re trying solve both problems at the same by teaching kids electronics by building a…

Number 3 is your strongest point, but the bottleneck there is really teachers not energy. On a scale needed to pull a society out of poverty you need not just a massive amount of imported teachers, but collegiate level teachers as well, and for decades.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#187

Post by SilverBirch »

woeh wrote: post #158
SilverBirch wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that basically what it's doing is saying "Here's all the energy that Britain consumes, divided by their total population". So sure, your electricity might only be 2100kWh, but did the government resurface a road nearby? Did you think about the fuel burned to transport the food you bought in the supermarket etc.

That makes sense. The definition might get a bit fuzzy when you have to account for the energy use of producing imported products, but I probably am getting a bit pedantic at this point. The overall point The article tries to make - poorer countries need more energy to get out of poverty - seems good.

Yeah, I think the whole thing about being modelled on Britain is deeply flawed - be like Britain, have a relatively small population in a temperate climate with lots of coast line for off-shore wind and tidal energy, and off-shore all your heavy manufacturing processes.

Who is going to tell Floridians they need to be like Britain and turn off their AC?

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#188

Post by CraigJPerry »

WalterBright wrote: post #133
stefan_ wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which then ignores the efficiency of the generation of gasoline, which takes lots of energy input to refine it into the form useful for ICE vehicles.. You can play this game all day long, depending on which figure you want to land on. Efficiency is nice but the reason it hasn't mattered at all is that it is more about what is readily available and cheaply exploited.

My google doctorate says that energy efficiency of refining is 90%. And you ignored the energy efficiency of mining coal. > You can play this game all day long And you should, to be serious about CO2 emissions reduction. Otherwise, we're all just fooling ourselves.

But only around 30% of the refined fuel’s energy transfers into useful work done with the ICE vehicle.

If the BEV is running with their 2kw heating turned up full blast in addition to running down the road, and there was a heat loss of around 2-5% while charging the car then We’re still at around 3x more efficient in the BEV vs the ICE.

Then there’s the electricity supply which ranges from 0 refinement loss and 50% thermal efficiency (natural gas fired power plant) to NaN% for nuclear, wind and solar.

A BEV charging right this minute in the UK is consuming energy originating from 25% gas, 25% nuclear, 25% wind, 5% solar (its 6:30pm).

It could be more than 5x when you compare with ICE fuel supply / refinement / storage / delivery.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#189

Post by kevingadd »

nkmnz wrote: post #128

I'm sure there's a lot of intellectual and emotional poverty out there that cannot be alleviated by any source of energy.

(As someone who doesn't agree with the article's conclusions), someone living in poverty does not have the resources to address intellectual and emotional poverty. If you can't afford to own or run a refrigerator, do you really have the time to (for example) tutor your kids outside of school hours, see a therapist, spend time relaxing on the weekends and in the evenings? No. You're probably working three jobs.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#190

Post by ohgodplsno »

space_fountain wrote: post #164
bequanna wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. And we could actually create a reliable grid vs. a shitty patchwork of unreliable power sources that require us to massively overbuild generation capacity. I guess we don't do this because too few bureaucrats can grift if we build nuke plants?

No grid is 100% reliable, but in the present situation where renewables are cheaper than nuclear it's not hard to see why they're being preferred. You'd need a story where that price difference is artificial or temporary (both possible)

Renewables are cheaper than nuclear mostly because of large state grants and tax reductions. Ultimately, if you want to handle all of your load with only renewables, you're going to need to build about 3x what's needed, just to account for wind turbines not running, sun not shining, etc, and you're going to need to replace most of it in 15 years, with rare earth materials that will start costing a lot of money. Needless to say, it's a waste, and the solution that most competent people agree on is to have a nuclear/renewables mix. Nuclear is necessary to provide a massive, stable base load. Renewables provide people some temporary independence and the overproduction could be sold. But, go for too many renewables, and suddenly you're back to burning gas at night to keep producing.
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