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All poverty is energy poverty

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Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#61

Post by GartzenDeHaes »

gizmo686 wrote: post #26

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 a…

You also need to install all this equipment somewhere protected from theft.

https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/rwanda-today/news/power...

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#62

Post by Theodores »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #9

I assumed they were just going to ignore renewables, since the kind of person who writes these things generally does. But instead they weirdly skipped over it and started fantasizing about some new technology that doesn't exist yet. What happened to energy poverty being important? "The current cheapest, cleanest, safest sources of energy in history aren't green enough for me" was not an ending I expected. Is this int…

The article has a fair dose of paternalistic exceptionalism regarding countries in Africa. Rwanda is not what people think it is, there is much to learn from how things are being done in Rwanda, however, they don't think they need their colonial masters to rule them any more. Hence, unless you seek out first hand accounts or visit the place, you would never know how wonderful the place is.

Nigeria still has the colonial yoke and problems of corruption, corruption and more corruption. Which is necessary for resource extraction, which serves to keep the country in poverty.

The World Bank/IMF and other big organisations have had the best part of a century to lift afflicted African nations out of poverty but they saddled them with debt instead.

The only people serious about alleviating poverty are the Chinese. They believe in peace and prosperity and we call them Communist. China has taken hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. We have got the numbers and those numbers are a good basis for how much energy the world needs.

Personally I think this topic is best understood with a petri dish and a bloom of mould. We are that mould and when the energy supply is exhausted our presence on the petri dish diminishes.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#63

Post by gizmo686 »

manholio wrote: post #58
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 v…

The Shockley–Queisser ceiling describes the limit of energy per unit area. It says nothing about the efficiency in terms of energy per unit money.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#65

Post by xyzzyz »

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.

18th and 19th century Brits who first built these systems were not very educated by our standards. Many of them, in fact, were uneducated tinkerers.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#66

Post by spaceman_2020 »

Growing up in Indian small towns in the 90s, I remember how people would casually mention the number of air conditioners they had in their house.

The cost of the AC, while hefty, wasn’t that big of a deal. The real brag was that they could afford to keep X number of ACs running.

Even today, my dad switches off the AC in his room early morning to cut down on his power bills.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#67

Post by yboris »

burlesona wrote: post #29
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 defin…

While difficult, it's I think within the reach of just about every individual in the developed world to empathize with and extend a helping hand to those who were merely unlucky to be born into poverty.

Giving What We Can is a community of thousands of people giving at least 10% of their pre-tax income to the most cost-effective charities they can find (consider GiveWell.org for research). I'm a proud member and hope more people join.

I'm happy to share thoughts on how to cultivate the empathy and gather motivation to act to help others as well.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#68

Post by mellavora »

coldtea wrote: post #22

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…

Thank you. I was going to make the same post. I'm a huge fan of all of the mod-cons, but for most of human history people lived with pre-industrial-revolution levels of tech.

And we still had rich and poor.

Poverty is when you don't have a good place in society, lack of respect by your fellows, and no security for your physical safety or property.

Re: All poverty is energy poverty

#69

Post by golemotron »

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 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

That's self-inflected and the result of poor choices. In a just world, Merkel would get more blame for cozying up to Russia, and the rest of Europe would as well for choosing austerity. As world events have shown, austerity is not robust in the face of events you can't control. It leads to a fragile energy system prone to catastrophic failure.

Poor choices, poor results. Europe can do better if they learn from this travesty.

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