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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#51

Post by Bud »

PeterisP wrote: post #34
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have the energy right now, though. And we'd have more, cheaper energy if we deployed new renewables. But the author seems to lose his interest in helping the poor if it didn't involve fossil fuels being used inefficiently.

We're on track on a big part of Europe being energy-restricted this winter, so at least right now there's not an abundance of energy even for the current needs of the first world, much less for those who cannot pay much and would need not the same amount but growth. In the long term many things are possible, but right now we don't have enough energy, and "if we deployed new renewables" is not an argument - we already…

We're not deploying new renewables "pretty much as fast as we can". We're not even close to doing that. In actuality, we have ludicrously-rich power centers which are actively subsidizing fossil fuels and warring against renewables. Imagine if all that effort were redirected.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#52

Post by EdTsft »

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?

"A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use." [1]

We have a long way to go before humanity's heat output is anywhere rivalling the heat the Sun dumps on us. Most of our power generation (except nuclear) is just repurposing the Sun's energy anyways, delaying its conversion into heat so that we can extract work from the process. The same heat is generated with or without our power plants. (Fossil fuels delay for so long that the energy release occurs at a much faster rate than it was gathered, but still insignificant compared to the regular solar energy incident on the Earth).

[1]: https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#53

Post by nordsieck »

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…

> Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH/day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half.

There's a number of people experimenting with converting chest freezers to chest fridges using an external thermostat. Apparently, these can be extremely efficient - people are reporting 10-20% of your 1.1kwH/day number.

Of course, the typical downsides of a chest freezer apply to a chest fridge - they're typically much more limited in size compared to their upright counterparts due to ergonomics, and the larger they are, the more difficult they are to fully utilize.

But they're a lot better than no fridge at all.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#54

Post by svnt »

ebiester wrote: post #31
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.

What if that's mixing cause and effect? If you have energy, you have refrigeration. You have the manufacturing properties to produce the things necessary for children to focus on education. You have the agricultural properties to increase yield and reduce the number of people needed for the agricultural sector, making education more valuable.

> If you have energy, you have refrigeration.

Not without having invented and scaled manufacturing for the refrigerator is the point. It is clearly not a given that access to energy results in the existence of certain technologies, although it does increase their probability of existence.

All of these things intermix. Having energy is a cause and an effect.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#55

Post by bottlepalm »

ebiester wrote: post #31
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.

What if that's mixing cause and effect? If you have energy, you have refrigeration. You have the manufacturing properties to produce the things necessary for children to focus on education. You have the agricultural properties to increase yield and reduce the number of people needed for the agricultural sector, making education more valuable.

Educated societies existed before refrigeration and manufacturing so those aren’t prerequisites.

The real prerequisite is an ‘educated society’ so there’s a bit of a bootstrapping/chicken/egg problem which is super difficult to solve.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#56

Post by Bud »

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.

Do they indeed? They appear to be getting proven right on a daily basis, lately.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#57

Post by svnt »

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…

It’s a failure of education, and in many ways a deliberate one because of the primacy of industry over the past century.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#58

Post by manholio »

nuclearnice3 wrote: post #49

Here's a more optimistic take especially with regard to solar. > There’s really no end in sight yet for improvements in solar and batteries. Cost drops are continuing simply from scaling up, and new materials and technologies are on the horizon that could generate continued price declines per unit of energy. https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessi...

Battery electrochemistry still has headroom, but solar is already approaching the Shockley–Queisser ceiling, which limits efficiency at about 30% for single junction and 50% for multiple junction devices. That's the absolute conversion limit, similar to the Carnot limit for thermal engines.

So if you can buy today cells that are 18-20% efficient, you should not expect dramatic improvements in the next decades, only very gradual. The cost will continue to drop, so given the huge areas available for solar, the potential is still huge.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#59

Post by misto »

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…

Had to check, our fridge model advertises about 0.8kwh/day. I guess while operating it with the ECO -mode.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#60

Post by gadders »

There seems to be a choice between artificially holding back energy generation due to net zero concerns keeping more people in poverty for longer, or we could pursue fossil fuels and nuclear and lift more people out of poverty now (and presumably hope for a future fix/mitigation for climate impacts).

I wonder which would save most lives overall? I would also note that those living in poverty currently don't seem to have a vote on the approach to take.

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