from Hacker News

We're going to need a lot of solar panels

by lionheart on 7/22/22, 8:54 PM with 808 comments

  • by Helmut10001 on 7/23/22, 5:01 AM

    People both underestimate and overestimate what PV can do. In summer and around noon, here in western Europe, there is so much PV-electricity produced that it is _almost_ enough to fulfill all demands. In winter, the amount is like a drop in the desert.

    I have built a 30 kWp PV at home 2 years ago - you would think this is quite big, for a private plant. It is not enough. If I want to power a heat pump (with drilled holes), e.g. to cover the heating for the house from November - February, I calculated I would need about 70 to 80 kWp (optimized for winter sun angle, e.g. pretty steep modules at 60° or 70° that relatively produce less in summer, but more in winter).

    Now I imagine all the people that buy tiny 5 kWp plants. The only way this would work is collaborative, with buffers at the medium-voltage level.

    So the biggest problem is really energy transfer or relocation, between different time's and regions´ needs (winter, summer; night, day; or from different regions worldwide).

    .. btw. here's a graphic for the calculation [1]. Blue is an imaginary heating pump electricity consumption over the year, red is the predicted pv production for a 60 kWp plant, where 30 kWp are at 60° angle - calculated with Europe's pvgis tool [2].

    [1]: https://ibb.co/WKsHPKX

    [2]: https://re.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pvg_tools/en/

  • by walrus01 on 7/22/22, 9:51 PM

    We're going to need a lot of solar panels and an efficient way to transport power from a very sunny place to another location where the loads are.

    For instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie

    The pacific DC intertie right now often ends up being used to transport power from hydroelectric dams in WA/OR to California. But there's nothing to say that something couldn't function the other way if there was enough willpower and budget to cover, for instance, a huge chunk of the desert near Edwards AFB in CA with hundreds of megawatts of photovoltaics.

    I searched for "high voltage DC" in that article and didn't see a mention of it, or anything much else about long distance transport of power.

    The technology now exists to theoretically cover many hundreds of square km of Libya in photovoltaics and take the electricty to Europe through a sub-sea cable, or series of cables. It's a matter of the political will and budget to do it.

    https://powertechresearch.com/the-worlds-longest-submarine-h...

  • by Willish42 on 7/23/22, 1:21 AM

    Wow, this is the most hopeful thing I've read about renewable energy in ... years, maybe ever?

    Even ignoring whether the fuel-from-air thing will pan out, the idea posed here that solar will get so cheap that excess energy can be used for stuff like this is insane.

    Not only did they explain the implications, but the author does a decent job at showing the math behind all of the insanely optimistic graphs. Thank you for sharing this OP! This is why I come to HN

  • by mmaunder on 7/23/22, 12:17 AM

    The trouble with our current system is that the answer to environmental catastrophe is to make more stuff. And the entities that make the stuff have an incentive to pursue models that see them continue to make that stuff and sell it.

    Creating a solar panel that never needs to be replaced is a business failure. Selling the same number of electric cars next year, instead of more, is a business failure. Not consuming more next year is an economic failure.

    We are locked into a forever growth runaway train and our solution to the earth dying is to make more, buy more and then buy even more of the same thing next year.

    Human population is predicted to decline in many parts of the world and this is seen as a massive economic risk, not a boon for the planet. It’s a risk because we’ve all gotten comfy with the guarantee that property we buy will always become worth more over time. Less humans to buy stuff? Unthinkable.

    Our very existence is the problem, and our insatiable appetites for reproducing and consuming. The sooner we show some humility and realize that we’re the problem, and our system of forever growth is guaranteed to destroy the planet, the better.

  • by tambourine_man on 7/23/22, 12:49 AM

    It’s been a while since I’ve read something that made me feel as excited and optimistic. I hope it pans out.

    It feels like early Intel days, seeing what costs would be if sales were orders of magnitude more than what they are and start selling at those prices now. A self-fulfilling prophecy of supply and demand.

  • by mgerdts on 7/22/22, 10:30 PM

    There's a lot of optimism in this article. Perhaps too much as it seems to gloss over some important details.

    > Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas.

    Then later it talks about how much desert there is, implying it's a great place for low-impact solar. How do the electricity and power come together and how much inefficiency is there in the wires or pipes? Presumably some of this water is likely to be sea water.

    Presumably the sea water that would be needed to feed the hydrocarbon production along with the sea water from desalination (also discussed later) will have their own problems. "desalination toxic brine" has 177,000 hits on google.

  • by fermentation on 7/22/22, 9:51 PM

    In every game of Factorio I've played I didn't realize just how many solar panels I'd needed until I was hitting my power limits and in desperate need of more. The problem being that manufacturing these takes... power.

  • by maerF0x0 on 7/23/22, 1:05 AM

    The amount of solar panes we need was first impressed upon my by David Mackay's "Without Hot Air"[1]. I personally think solar is a useful tool for certain applications, but powering all of humanity with it feels like a step backwards paradigmatically.

    Really roughly speak we can think of solar as a step forward in human compatible photosynthesis.

    Humanity went to another tier of energy when we started to harness fire with steam and later internal combustion engines.

    Electrical transmission is definitely more convenient than moving bags of rice (stored photosynthesis), pipelines of oil and gas (also stored photosynthesis). This electrical grid can also store its energy through various "batteries"(used loosely) with various entropy.

    But nuclear power really seems to be the paradigm shift. Instead of being many steps down the chain from solar nuclear to capturing a minuscule portion, we can capture far far more (the majority?) of it for our uses. I feel like we're just so new at it, we're like early mankind using fire burning ourselves, choking on smoke, and generally unsophisticated comparatively to the incredible control and harness of the power one sees in, say, a racing motorcycle -- firing 14k times per second with perfectly controlled, atomized gasoline and air mixture, compressed to exact ratios...

    Such a good article, as someone else mentioned it really is an inspiring subject.

    [1]: Chapter on solar: https://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_38.shtml

  • by leobg on 7/22/22, 10:49 PM

    What would interest me: Can I do this locally, at the site of the consumer? Take the unused PV output of my house in summer to fill my house’s tank with natural gas for use in winter? Is that something that would be technically feasible today?

  • by acyou on 7/22/22, 11:52 PM

    In general, increasing the concentration of any product in a closed system requires net energy input across the system boundary. Larger increases in concentration need more energy input than smaller increases of concentration.

    Concentrating atmospheric CO2 involves increasing the concentration from approx. 400 ppm, to a higher target concentration. That's 0.04%. There is no way around the energy input requirement within the basic, universally applicable and virtually undisputed laws of thermodynamics. You can make your process as efficient as possible, but there is a minimum energy requirement (theoretical limit) that you can calculate on a per unit basis for atmospheric CO2 capture that is very, very, very high.

    For that reason, industry captures CO2 at point source (you start from a higher concentration). Unless you have zero access to point sources, point source capture will always be more "Environmentally Friendly" than atmospheric carbon capture.

  • by intrepidhero on 7/22/22, 10:02 PM

    I get sabatier and electrolysis but what is a CO2 concentrator? Or rather how does it work? I thought that was the expensive and relatively unknown part of the process.

    Aside: Sweet company website https://terraformindustries.com/

  • by pixiemaster on 7/23/22, 6:26 AM

    in WW2, we moved to war economy to build multiple planes per hour, multiple landing ships per day etc, all while rubber, steel, oil, where in short supply.

    we should do this again with solar panels.

    a vast overproduction of solar energy would even allow for less distribution need, doing away with wasting time&energy on hydrogen and batteries.

  • by guerby on 7/23/22, 9:20 AM

    Current consumer friendly rack battery LFP prices are at around 400 EUR/kWh for 6000 cycles at 80% degrations, that's 0.074 EUR per kWh out the the battery.

    5 kW inverter price are about 700 EUR, if you assume you have to change them every 7 years and you're getting 6 MWh/year out of the inverter that's 0.017 EUR/kWh.

    PV prices are around 0.5 EUR/Watt peak and where I live in France you get about 1000 hours of equivalent peak production per year so that's 0.02 EUR / kWh produced by the panels assuming 25 year life.

    All in all you're at about 0.11-0.12 EUR/kWh if you manage to consume all produced/stored kWh, which is easy if you have one or two electric vehicule charging at home.

    As mentionned here the hard part are 3-4 winter month where solar production is way lower than the rest of the year.

    An additional data point for gaz form of energy storage: a standard "35kg" propane bottle has about 450 kWh of energy in it, if you need 1.4 MWh of heat in the winter to complete solar + heat pump output that's just three bottles. To my knowledge no way to produce/fill it from gaz produced from summer electricity with home sized equipment (yet).

  • by ChuckMcM on 7/23/22, 4:53 PM

    As I pointed out to Casey on Twitter as well, this strategy works really well with Nuclear as well. Largely because the production of fuel rather than electricity means you can transport it over great distances without the losses generated by heat or radiation.

    My suggestion was setting up a 3GW nuclear plant in the middle of the Nevada Test site (an area that would not suffer in the extremely unlikely event there was any leakage of radioactive material in the even more rare event of an accident) And have that plant produce methane 24/7. It can ship the methane by pipeline to anywhere and provide heating or electricity using existing gas infrastructure.

    If you made it a more complex breeder reactor (or had a breeder reactor on site and a fuel reclamation facility) it could do that essentially forever. (caveat lifetime of materials and maintenance etc).

    Solar works for this too, but you have to build a lot of panels (this is the article lede of course).

    This is also how fusion would change everything as well, with excess power you could spend it on making carbon neutral burnable fuels and desalinating water for mitigating droughts.

  • by outworlder on 7/22/22, 10:16 PM

    If we forget about where the power is coming from for the moment, wasn't the US Navy experimenting with fuel synthesis? Did that go anywhere?

    A nuclear powered carrier has no use for fuel itself, it only stores fuel for aircraft operations. Having the ability to make fuel on site with all the excess cheap electricity seems to be a game changer.

    Wondering what happened to it. That is the latest I can find: https://www.autoevolution.com/news/us-navy-aircraft-carriers...

    300k grant? That's peanuts for something that has incredible potential.

    Obviously, I'm looking at future civilian applications for the tech.

  • by elihu on 7/22/22, 10:59 PM

    Another use of natural gas is to make fertilizer. Maybe you'd use a different process though if your end goal is to make ammonia? (I'm not an expert, but it seems you'd use electrolyzed hydrogen either way, but Haber Bosch reacts with nitrogen instead of CO2.)

  • by Symmetry on 7/23/22, 11:39 AM

    In the US at least I think it would be better to describe the rate at which we add solar to the grid as limited by regulatory and grid management issues. The backlog of projects waiting to be approved, in terms of capacity, is about as large as the currently installed solar capacity. One problem here is figuring out the transmission issues related to adding new capacity, so it's not just a purely regulatory issue, but the way in which grid capacity is added assumed new plants would look more like coal plants so there are regulatory aspects to it.

    But of course, if you're going to just use your solar field to make hydrocarbon when the sun shines you don't have to care about any of that.

  • by bratwurst3000 on 7/23/22, 3:18 AM

    I once estimated that it need the surface area of spain to power all of the world. Asuming all energy is electricity at that point. And I only took bad numbers like 100w sqm for 2-3 h a day.

    So very local photovoltaic and storage is more or less the solution in my opinion.

  • by standardUser on 7/22/22, 10:10 PM

    Can anyone provide a summary of this blog post? I am finding it strangely tricky to follow.

  • by akira2501 on 7/22/22, 10:15 PM

    A monoculture of generation and distribution technologies is not a desirable outcome from an engineering perspective. Your goal shouldn't be to put PV everywhere and then just "solve the distribution problem." You're almost certainly going to make things worse that way.

    Also.. if you have excess residential electrical supplies, I'd think a good goal would be to get electricity to the people that don't have it first, rather than imagining new industrial processes that rely on continued excesses to function.

    It all smacks of thinking that the Earth is a giant inconvenient ledger that just needs to be balanced, at any cost, apparently.

  • by kesor on 7/23/22, 8:40 PM

    Isn't this what trees do already?

    And if trees don't do it "good enough", should we really replace the trees with technological mini-chemical-plants that will starve all of the CO2?

    I don't get it.

    Why do humans think their crazy ideas are better for nature, while at the same time it is obvious they are going to exterminate whole species when implemented.

  • by acidburnNSA on 7/23/22, 12:01 AM

    You could satisfy the world current demand for energy by covering 0.08% of the Sahara Desert with nuclear power plants.

  • by ngcc_hk on 7/23/22, 6:22 AM

    3 important take

    1. Is Solar economic viable?

    Not sure “ Crude oil prices are between $60 and $100/barrel, indicating cost parity at between $10 and $17/MWh. There are already solar farms installed in some places that sell power at these prices, and between now and 2030 solar costs should come down at least another 60%.”. But $60 is high. Obviously not now but just months ago we talked about selling oil for loss.

    Freaking is $40 somewhat I remember

    2. The artificial Russian invasion of Ukraine

    The tyranny of Russia need 10 years to resolve. And solar might work in this decade abd hope his learning curve continue.

    3. Local game to play like river

    The play like conversion of solar back to ch4 (methane) or sea to river etc only make sense in a few place. It is local.

    In fact one wonder why Australia and Sahara desert is not more solar.

    4. Transportation might be hard

    1/3 lost to cable. Still as a guy demo you need a hugh solar plant farm to do one house. Still need solar farm and storage via many means.

  • by stewbrew on 7/23/22, 6:36 AM

    BTW the author is the founder of a company called Terraform Industries. (Their for a commercial business strangely looking homepage: https://terraformindustries.com/.) This is funny because there is also a company called Terraform Power in the renewable business. The names of these two companies seem surprisingly close to me. Are these two somehow connected? Is this just ignorance on part of the author?

    On their Twitter profile they talk about "Gigascale atmospheric hydrocarbon synthesis". Which is an interesting wording for a company that doesn't even have a proper homepage.

  • by hedora on 7/23/22, 3:30 AM

    I really want carbon capture to work, but arguing from first principles, I think the approach in the paper will be a niche product, and is probably a decade too early. (I honestly do wish them well.)

    Feel free to poke holes in my math:

    From the article, the proposed technology is about 30% energy efficient. Let's round that up to 33.3%, so I can multiply by three below.

    They propose using this for natural gas production for home heating. They're competing with hybrid heat pump water heaters and air-to-air heat pumps that work throughout Europe. Those have coefficients of power above four, in practice.

    So, it will take 12x more electricity to heat homes with legacy boilers and synthetic LNG than with heat pumps, assuming no transmission loss. PG&E in California is notoriously inefficient; they somehow triple the cost of electricity when they deliver it. Assuming that is pessimal, and that natural gas distribution is free, it will cost more than 4x as much. At current energy prices, that means the heat pumps pay for themselves quickly.

    With the Ukraine crisis, leaders should find N houses on electric heat, and roughly 3N on natural gas. Upgrade them all to heat pumps. This would have zero net effect on the energy grid, but remove three houses worth of natural gas heating demand! Manufacturing and installation for this already ramped, so it could start happening tomorrow. (Well, Monday, since it is the weekend.)

    On to replacing LNG at all costs, because we have to, and replacing infrastructure won't work for some applications:

    There are carbon capture technologies that use less energy than burning the equivalent fossil fuel created. Say one is "just" break even. For the same solar panel consumption as the technology in the article, you could extract and burn 1 carbon unit of fossil fuel, and capture three units of carbon! That's much better than net zero.

    As I said, I wish them well, but I hope a more efficient approach wins. As the article says, they will need 10 extra years of solar panel ramp up for their math to work. By then, we'd better have already ramped carbon capture!

  • by ZeroGravitas on 7/23/22, 10:33 AM

    Nice article, but one sentence annoyed me:

    > At current rates of production growth, the supply/demand mismatch will see a 10 year backlog between the time when local solar powered synthetic fuel production reaches cost parity with fossil sources, and when solar supply will be available to meet that demand.

    I hate this use of "at current rates", it's basically a lie if you don't follow up with some kind of lower bound to go with that upper bound and people believing this is not possible, or too costly, or too late is one of the main problems.

    He called out the hairy back prediction graph further up and then did basically the same thing with words.

    But overall a good summary.

  • by someweirdperson on 7/22/22, 10:09 PM

    > "Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas."

    That's a pretty artificial form of natural gas.

  • by alsargent on 7/29/22, 6:45 PM

    To get a sense of how many solar panels and batteries we'll need, drive around Houston, Texas some time. You'll see mile after mile of chemical refineries. Granted, some of these are for plastics and not energy production. But a lot ARE for energy production -- and it's crazy to imagine how many square miles of solar and battery factories we'll need to provide an equivalent amount of energy production.

  • by ianai on 7/23/22, 1:44 AM

    “Our process works by using solar power to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, concentrating CO2 from the atmosphere, then combining CO2 and hydrogen to form natural gas”

    Tell me if this sounds familiar. How about we store that natural gas underground in the same areas we’ve been taking it out? Sounds kinda like a natural for energy storage and a little carbon sequestration.

    (Can’t be sure with myself whether I’m serious or sarcastic in this one. But I definitely want carbon out of the air…)

  • by Kosirich on 7/24/22, 7:53 AM

    My dad just installed 200kW on the roof of his factory. The biggest issue is getting the blip* contract with the grid so you could sell the electricity back, and I mean that at any rate. This is by far the biggest hurdle so having an alternative to store energy that makes economic sense will be the biggest wind in the back for a lot of people wanting to do the same.

  • by mikewarot on 7/23/22, 6:56 AM

    It seems to me we need a lot of nuclear power. In the US, we need to close the fuel cycle, reprocessing all the existing spent fuel, and building a new class of reactors that can handle the resulting fuel mix.

    With this base energy supply in hand, our options are far more flexible for extracting carbon from the air, and either making fuels, or petrochemical feed stock from it.

  • by KingOfCoders on 7/23/22, 6:21 AM

    My Casio watch is solar powered and the "panel" can't be seen becaue it's too small and incorporated in the design (btw. best watch ever, <$100, solar, radio, Gshock). We will film print "panels" everywhere, all office buildings, all cars.

    If you're thinking in "panels" you don't envision the future.

  • by skybrian on 7/23/22, 12:13 AM

    This article seems rather hand-wavy. I would have liked to seen more about what the physical and economic limits might be. In particular, how the cost of the solar panels themselves compare with all the other costs needed to get a working plant.

    Is industry going to learn to make cheaper land? How much can labor realistically be reduced?

  • by danschumann on 7/23/22, 2:13 AM

    I mean if we suck it out of the air and put it back in cars, then we close the loop, right? No more externalities?

  • by woah on 7/22/22, 9:49 PM

    Is this better or worse than the one where they are cooking corn husks to make oil to squirt into the ground?

  • by pbourke on 7/23/22, 2:48 PM

    I was confused about something in this article. After the natural gas is synthesized, it’s pumped into the existing NG infrastructure for heating and electricity generation? Doesn’t that emit CO2 into the atmosphere once again? Or is it such that CO2 removed >> CO2 added?

  • by scotty79 on 7/23/22, 9:14 AM

    This is fascinating technology for turning CO2 into C

    https://www.upstreamonline.com/energy-transition/is-liquid-m...

  • by djenendik on 7/23/22, 2:50 PM

    As others have pointed going carbon neutral is a good step, but should we should keep in mind the CO2 ppm that will be reached at the neutrality point. Is this something that we can live with?

  • by holografix on 7/23/22, 12:37 AM

    Can someone point me to a “loss of performance” type formula for solar panels as their angle to the sun deviates from 90° and “sunshine strength” as the sun rises and dips in the sky?

  • by InDemoVeritas on 7/23/22, 2:55 AM

    Is there enough silver to make 300 TW capacity of solar panels?

  • by taf2 on 7/22/22, 11:49 PM

    Why don’t we build a few nuclear power plants at least to buy time for the energy densities of batteries to get to the point that we can store enough energy for everyone

  • by 35mm on 7/23/22, 10:05 AM

    I think electrolysing water into hydrogen using excess solar in the winter, then using that directly for heating in the winter would make a lot of sense.

  • by scaramanga on 7/23/22, 2:38 AM

    As in many times more solar panels than can be constructed with all of the resources that can possibly ever be extracted from the earth? I suppose that is true, and an be verified with some pretty simple back of the envelope calculations.

    I must admit, I only skimmed through the apparently meaningless technobabble, but if someone could let me know succinctly, we still don't have anything more effective at carbon sequestration that trees, right? And how well are trees doing?

  • by briantakita on 7/23/22, 3:37 AM

  • by rahimiali on 7/23/22, 8:28 PM

    could someone explain the benefit of storing energy as natural gas? once you burn it, doesn't it result in co2? doesn't that defeat the effort? also is natural gas really easier to pipe around than electricity?

    I know I'm missing the point of the article so looking for helpful guidance.

  • by CodeWriter23 on 7/23/22, 3:55 PM

    What about the toxic waste from expended panels? Since you’re going to be using “a lot of” them.

  • by alex_young on 7/23/22, 3:39 AM

    Are synthetic hydrocarbons more efficient energy storage than li batteries? Seems unlikely.

  • by azinman2 on 7/23/22, 2:25 AM

    Given all of the factors involved to manufacture the capacity the author is talking about (we'll ignore labor & land costs to install), wouldn't it be better to put that into cheaper/safer/smaller nuclear power? It already runs 24/7 with no CO2.

  • by osigurdson on 7/22/22, 10:10 PM

    >> but the energy demands are astronomical

    Maybe not the best idea then.

  • by caseyf7 on 7/23/22, 4:06 AM

    Why is China’s photovoltaic potential so low?

  • by neonsunset on 7/23/22, 6:51 AM

    Or just a few nuclear power plants…

  • by zmix on 7/23/22, 2:35 AM

    Article has very good wording!

  • by zackmorris on 7/23/22, 5:18 PM

    Here is a similar project that generates kerosene and diesel from water and carbon dioxide by using a ceria-based redox reaction to convert them into hydrogen and carbon monoxide (syngas):

    https://newatlas.com/energy/solar-jet-fuel-tower/

    The plant created 5191 liters (1371 gallons) of syngas in 9 days, whereas a Boeing 787 Dreamliner carries 126,372 liters (36,384 gallons). The conversions are not linear, but that is something like a refueled plane every 219 days, give or take an order of magnitude. Looks like the conversion efficiency is 4% but 20% is expected after recycling heat and catalyst improvements.

    I find stuff like this simultaneously inspiring and devastating. The technology has arrived to easily create our own electricity and fuel without having to deal with supply chain issues around centralized photovoltaic manufacturers, yet the size of the challenge is insurmountable. There is simply no way to scale this big enough to save the natural world before global warming destroys it at the end of the century.

    So, that leaves us with nuclear power (fission). I appreciate that a lot of people have worked very hard on it and have humanity's best interests at heart. But they don't understand human psychology. We all know that we've been lied to about the safety of nuclear power, but they pretend that it can be made safe. While simultaneously avoiding discussion about the externalities like nuclear waste storage, nuclear proliferation, even the inherent security issues around large centralized power generation or what will happen after wars or other emergencies force workers to abandon nuclear facilities. So I don't trust them, and that's why I don't consider nuclear to be a viable alternative, and I have an unlimited list of evidence against it so I don't bother debating it anymore.

    Which leaves us with what I feel is the actual solution. Yet again, as in most things, we have to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. I think that we'll solve it through cultural evolution. Each of us has to get to sustainability on an individual level, then lift at least one other person (preferably someone we don't know) out of dependence. Which is still a big problem, but it's smaller than paying off a mortgage.

    So everyone's gotta wake up, forget they got hoodwinked, stop listening to the wealthy and powerful people talking us out of this, and just start doing it. Be a real conservative, lead by example. Be a real liberal, pay it forward. Mourn the breakdown of our institutions that set this back 40 years. Then do something about it by evangelizing sustainability and stop voting for people who pass the buck. Help people who don't get it find their way out of cognitive dissonance.

    Solarpunk is a great place to start.

  • by shanghaikid on 7/23/22, 1:01 AM

    China dominates industry.

  • by oxff on 7/23/22, 4:39 AM

    Just use nuclear power.

  • by rob_c on 7/22/22, 10:02 PM

    And a lot of so far non existent recycling technologies and resources...

  • by antishatter on 7/22/22, 11:54 PM

    Solar is a meme, nuclear is the only way we get the grid off carbon.

  • by stjohnswarts on 7/23/22, 7:47 AM

    <whisper>we're gonna need nuclear no matter what the "green" power people say</whisper>

  • by wheelerof4te on 7/23/22, 9:11 AM

    What people don't realize is that solar power is not enough to support industrial production. Neither is hydro and wind power.

    To have enough solar energy, you would need huge fields of panels where the sun shines bright. Panels block the sunlight beneath, so you can't plant anything where the panels are. On the other hand, you need space for agriculture. So, you see where the problem is.

    Large wind turbines also need a lot of space to be efficient. And you can't just place those anywhere, either. Wind turbines need strong wind to work.

    Hydro power plants need water flow to generate energy. So you can't have those anywhere, of course.

    The only reliable and eco-firendly way to generate power are nuclear power plants. You can build them anywhere, they produce small waste per output and they require about the same space as any coal-based plant.

    Sadly, you need good experts and no bad luck to operate them safely. Otherwise, we saw what happens.

  • by betwixthewires on 7/23/22, 6:30 AM

    All that gas and oil was once a massive biological solar panel, covering much of the ocean, absorbing sunlight, storing it, reproducing, growing only to get subducted and stored for us, like a battery. For a billion years.

    When I hear people talk about building solar panels to convert water and CO2 into methane gas for its explosive energy potential to meet our needs, mining pits in the ground all over the world, razing landscapes to steal their sunlight, as if they're going to ever come close to the methane that's already there, and that without doing more environmental damage than our current state of affairs comes close to, I wonder how delusional or dishonest you have to be to pitch an investor. And I'm fearful of the mentality and the utter destruction of the environment this absurdity will lead us to. They would have us pave the earth to save it.

    If you're worried about climate change, the only way stop it is to reduce the amount of energy consumed, the amount of plastic produced, the amount of ammonia made through the Haber Bosch process. This necessarily means killing, at a minimum, three quarters of the world's human population, along with the livestock that are alive currently that will feed them. And then you've got to get past the unbelievably massive spike in carbon dioxide as all these carcasses decay, carbon dioxide that was once locked up in oil as well, since all these living organisms are made possible only by way of the fertilizer they were fed that was made from oil.

    It's not pretty, but that's the only way to do it. Do you think we should do it?