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All poverty is energy poverty
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Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#92I can't help thinking of the 'Milton Friedman' quote
'If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand'
expanded out to the giant unelected global bureaucracies some people would appear to want to give permission to run energy supplies.
Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#93Earlier 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.
See Europe now for an example of how over-reliance on intermittent generation with no storage yields incredible energy instability. Who wants a grid where your refrigerator can't run when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?
That is not Europe's energy problem today. Their current problem is that a significant amount of their energy infrastructure relies on continuous imports; but a major exported has decided to stop selling to them for reasons that have nothing to do with technology. This dynamic has been a defining feature of geopolitics for the past half century or so. Whenever you hear talk about "energy independence" you are hearing talk about mitigating a problem that is almost exclusive to fossil fuels.
Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#94Earlier 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.
See Europe now for an example of how over-reliance on intermittent generation with no storage yields incredible energy instability. Who wants a grid where your refrigerator can't run when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?
That's not the case? The big issue in europe is that electricity is expensive, not unreliable. With more renewables the current price spikes in fossil energy wouldn't hurt so much (or, admittedly, more local production capability of fossil energy).
Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#95Interesting 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…
We do have the energy. The US spends enough energy on transportation that the entire world could have refrigeration. The US spends 28% of total energy consumption on transportation. 93.33 Quadrillion BTUs x .28 / 3142 (BTUs per kWh) / 365 (days per year) = 22.8B kWh per day. BEV vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE vehicles. We could have the same standard of living and just not use gas-powered vehicles and save ~…
> BEV vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE vehicles.
I've seen this figure before. It ignores the efficiency of the generation of electric power to charge the EV.
A much more realistic figure is 2x.
Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#96This 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.
Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#97> 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…
Nuclear Winter can stop Global Warming with room to spare, so, maybe, Russians do the right thing when they are shelling Ukrainian nuclear power plant. Maybe, Ukrainian just need to return the fire.
Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#98Interesting related presentation on what is energy and how it relates to the economy from a physical point of view https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s254IPHXgVA&t=3367
Note: presented in a controversial way, that's the style of this speaker
Re: All poverty is energy poverty
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
See Europe now for an example of how over-reliance on intermittent generation with no storage yields incredible energy instability. Who wants a grid where your refrigerator can't run when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?
That's not the case? The big issue in europe is that electricity is expensive, not unreliable. With more renewables the current price spikes in fossil energy wouldn't hurt so much (or, admittedly, more local production capability of fossil energy).
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