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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#21

Post by megaman821 »

woeh wrote: post #14

> At its core, however, the math here is very simple. In the US, the average person uses 77,000 kWh per year. The average Finn uses only about 58,000 kWh. The Brits, good global citizens, use only about 30,000 kWh on average. Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses…

It's hard to tell from the link, but this seems to be comparing the US' electricity consumption to the UK's electricity consumption. Most of the UK's energy use is from burning fuel for heat. Using energy and electricity as interchangeable is very confusing. That said, I would assume if you included all energy usage the US would still be a lot more because we drive so much more.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#22

Post by coldtea »

Not really.

A lot of poverty is societal poverty (of order, collaboration, help, education, distribution, and so on) and is worse, even all other things (like relative cost of energy to average salary) being equal.

You can be a slum-living destitute poor in a country even though you have financial access personally to several times the energy expenditure of someone in another country (or area of same country) with a different lifestyle.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#23

Post by coldtea »

mcculley wrote: post #20

If we had energy cheap enough for every human to live at the highest current levels of consumption, wouldn’t we have to do something with the waste heat? Radiator fins on space elevators? Or can we send it out into space from the ground?

We can't even get a stable grid, decent infrastructure, or stocked supermarkets... let alone fancy technology. I would't hold my breat about that going forward.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#24

Post by Victerius »

pickovven wrote: post #8
Victerius wrote: post #5

More reading: https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Worlds-Energy-Prob... > No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall econ…

You might be pleased to learn that the Malthusians have a nearly 200 year record of being wrong.

Malthus was right. He was just ahead of his time. There are too many people in the world and it's the cause of climate change and almost every problem.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#25

Post by ebiester »

photochemsyn wrote: post #2

On this: > "There's probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda's annual energy usage. That's about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully on…

I think the point is explained further below - the author is making a reference to the amount of energy required if the world had a developed standard of living, not saying that we would ever use natural gas down there.

> It can be done. In the near term, it is conceivable that already-common sources of renewable energy like wind and solar power can meet most of the need. Things would be easier if existing nuclear power technologies were expanded, or at least if we avoided shutting such plants down prematurely.

> But the more fanciful world described above—the one in which, thanks to plentiful energy, the world has eliminated want—is possible only with continued innovation. In the long term, the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#26

Post by gizmo686 »

Energy is not sufficient to do stuff. You still need a thing to convert that energy into something useful, and those things cost money as well. Taking refrigeration as an example; using my local home improvement store as an example (which isn't the most representative for the costs applicable to national development, but should be good enough for napkin math):

A refrigerator/freezer running at 1.17 KwH/day goes for about $800 USD. [0]

For $100 USD, I can get a solar panel that claims about 300 Wh/day[1]

This puts the cost of energy at about the same as the cost of making the energy useful. Obviously Rwanda isn't going to buy retail from Home Depot. Further, I suspect that when done at scale, you will find that the discount you see over retail for energy is more significant than the discount you see for refrigerators.

Granted, making the refrigerator requires energy. However, it also requires a factory and components. Making those requires energy, but also other factories and components.

Looking at how this plays out in a developed country. In the US 2021, the electricity industry had a revenue of about $430 Billion [2], for an economy with a GDP of about 23 Trillion [3]. In total, energy accounts for about 5% of GDP. [4]

Running that $800 USD refrigerator I mentions above would cost me about $0.08 USD/day

Sure, doing stuff requires energy, and we need to prepare for the energy demands of developing nations to increase. However, the cost of energy is a small fraction of the cost of most of the stuff you want to do with the energy. Sure, if energy was orders of magnitude cheaper, then that may enable more usages of energy, but even those things would require investment beyond energy generation to do.

[0] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-20-5-cu-ft-Top-Freeze...

[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Grape-Solar-100-Watt-Monocrystal...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190548/revenue-of-the-us...

[3] https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-fourth-...

[4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53620

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#29

Post by burlesona »

Ozzie_osman wrote: post #15

Interesting to see the comment thread digging into all sorts of criticism of the article (is it 2 kWh / fridge? Or 1.1? Should the author discuss renewable earlier or more seriously?) The main point I got from the article was a helpful reminder that a large part of the world doesn't have basic things that I take for granted (not just refrigeration, but you might also include air conditioning, transportation, etc). An…

One thing I’ve learned over time is that it’s just really, really difficult for most people (including me!) to reason about things that they haven’t directly experienced. Even harder to have empathy. So it’s very hard to engage with an argument or discussion that’s about the world as a whole, because all of us have such difficulty properly weighting and evaluating the things we have no experience with (which by definition, for everyone, is most of the world).
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