Yeah, the technology connections video on this was fantastic. If one was to cover that land in solar, you’d produce far more than the current energy demands of the US.
Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time. It’s the same reason EV’s make up a far larger share of new car sales than a percentage of overall cars, EV’s sucked 20+ years ago yet there are a lot of 20+ year old cars on the road.
The US stopped building coal power plants over a decade ago but we still have a lot of them. Meanwhile we’ve mostly been building solar, which eventually means we’ll have a mostly solar grid but that’s still decades away.
> The economics only changed recently and infrastructure lasts a long time
This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do. It is reasonable that when someone gives up a couple of things because that person is rich (rich as in a person in the developed world) the sacrifice is more or less acceptable.
Now change environment and think that these sacrifices are way worse. Even worse than that: that has more implications in conservative cultures where, whether you like it or not, showing "muscle" (wealth) is socially important for them to reach other soccial layers that will make their lives easier.
But giving up those things is probably a very bad choice for their living.
America cannot be compared to South East Asia economically speaking, for example. So the comparison of the coal centrals is not even close.
A salary in Vietnam is maybe 15 million VND for many people. With that you can hardly live in some areas. It is around 600 usd.
It also started importing liquid natural gas in 2023.
But it has abundant sunlight, access to low cost Chinese solar panels that will produce electricity for decades instead of being burned once, and a substantial domestic photovoltaic manufacturing industry of its own.
"Renewable Energy Investments in Vietnam in 2024 – Asia’s Next Clean Energy Powerhouse" (June 2024)
In 2014, the share of renewable energy in Vietnam was just 0.32%. In 2015, only 4 megawatts (MW) of installed solar capacity for power generation was available. However, within five years, investment in solar energy, for example, soared.
As of 2020, Vietnam had over 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of rooftop solar power connected to the national grid. These renewable energy numbers surpassed all expectations. It marked a 25-fold increase in installed capacity compared to 2019’s figures.
In 2021, the data showed that Vietnam now has 16.5 GW of solar power. This was accompanied by its green energy counterpart wind at 11.8 GW. A further 6.6 GW is expected in late 2021 or 2022. Ambitiously, the government plans to further bolster this by adding 12 GW of onshore and offshore wind by 2025.
These growth rates are actually much faster than growth rates in the US.
> This needs investment also. An investment poorer people cannot or do not want to do.
The general premise of investments is that you end up with fewer resources by not doing them.
It now costs less to install a new solar or wind farm than to continue using an existing coal plant, much less if you were considering building a new coal plant, and that includes the cost of capital, i.e. the interest you have to pay to borrow the money for the up-front investment.
Poorer countries would be at a slight disadvantage if they have to pay higher than average interest rates to borrow money, but they also have the countervailing advantage of having lower labor and real estate costs and the net result is that it still doesn't make sense for anybody to continue to use coal for any longer than it takes to build the replacement.
It just takes more than zero days to replace all existing infrastructure.
That's why it will require a functional government who can use taxes responsibly to make the technology affordable to everyone. The US had a pretty good start until one man decided to stop and try to reverse any progress made.
Trump's animus against wind in particular is definitely specific to the man. He was annoyed by a wind farm in Scotland. Trump of course thinks he's one of those old fashioned kings† (and the US has been annoyingly willing to go along with that, how are those "checks and balances" and your "co-equal branches of government" working out for you?) and so he thought the local government would go along with his whims and prohibit the wind farm but they did not.
I'm sure there's some degree of vested interest in protecting fossil energy because it means very concentrated profits in a way that renewables do not. Sunlight isn't owned by anybody (modulo Simpsons references) and nor is the Wind, but I'd expect that, if that was all it was, to manifest as diverting funding to transitional work, stuff that keeps $$$ in the right men's pockets, rather than trying to do a King Canute. Stuff like paying a wind farm not to be constructed feels very Trump-specific.
† The British even know what you do with kings who refuse to stop breaking the law. See Charles the First, though that's technically the English I suspect in this respect the Scots can follow along. If the King won't follow the Law, kill the King, problem solved.
Trump’s campaign had financial backing from a number of oil and gas industry investors. Following the money in this case is not very difficult. He’s just a useful idiot, the whole industry put him there and are profiting at the expense of the rest of us.
But why should American taxpayers be responsible for making the technology affordable for everyone? Why shouldn't Europe or China be expected to shoulder this financial burden?
EDIT: I think people are misunderstanding my response. I fully support local subsidies for solar and renewables. My question is why my tax dollars should go toward making it affordable for everyone, including non-Americans. Either market dynamics will handle that naturally, artificially (i.e., China's manufacturing subsidies), or else it is up to the local government to address the shortfall.
Isn't the American complaint that China did exactly that by subsidizing its solar industry and flooding the global market with panels cheaper than Americans could make?
China is, it's subsidies have resulted in a glut of cheap solar panel production which the world has benefited from. European counties subsidise their own citizens switch to solar, the US no longer does at the federal level.
Responding to your edit: A wider version of the same argument might apply. The US has (historically) benefited considerably from global stability and this does seem to help with that because if basically everybody has energy independence and the overheating doesn't get much worse they might chill the fuck out?
We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power. Perhaps we will eventually, but until that actually happens the base load requirement represents a hard limit on the amount of solar generation capacity that the grid can handle.
We started scaling batteries after solar (because the technology reached the point where they were profitable after solar)... but they're being installed at scale now, and at a rapdily increasing rate.
Batteries provided 42.8% of California's power at 7pm a few days ago (which came across my social media feed as a new record) [1]. And it wasn't a particularly short peak, they stayed above 20% of the power for 3 hours and 40 minutes. It's a non-trivial amount of dispatchable power.
Batteries are a form of dispatchable power not "base load". There is no "base load" requirement. Base load is simply a marketing term for power production that cannot (economically) follow the demand curve and therefore must be supplemented by a form of dispatchable power, like gas peaker plants, or batteries. "Base load" power is quite similar to solar in that regard. The term makes sense if you have a cheap high-capitol low running-cost source of power (like nuclear was supposed to be, though it failed on the cheap front) where you install as much of it as you can use constantly and then you follow the demand curve with a different source of more expensive dispatchable power. That's not the reality we find ourselves in unless you happen to live near hydro.
I think the mysterious "Misc" electricity which sometimes appears at dawn and then dusk in the UK is likewise BESS†. The raw data doesn't seem to have labels for BESS, a lot of it was oriented around how electricity works twenty five years ago, there's an 850MW power plant here, and one there and one there, and we measure those. So it can cope with a wind farm - say 500MW or 1GW coming ashore somewhere, but not really with the idea that there's 10GW of solar just scattered all over the place on a bright summer's day and the batteries might similarly be too much?
† My thinking is: Dawn because in a few hours the solar comes online, you can refill those batteries at whatever price that is, so sell what you have now for the dawn price, and Dusk because the solar is mostly gone but people are running ovens and so on to make food in the evening, so you can sell into that market. But I might be seeing what I expect not reality.
> We haven't been building much battery storage to go along with that solar power
That too has pretty recently changed. Even my home state of Idaho is deploying pretty big batteries. It takes almost no time to deploy it's all permitting and public comment at this point that takes the time.
Batteries have gotten so cheap that the other electronics and equipement at this point are bigger drivers of the cost of installation.
Here's an 800MWh station that's being built in my city [1].
I think people are just generally stuck with the perception of where things are currently at. They are thinking of batteries and solar like it's 2010 or even 2000. But a lot has changed very rapidly even since 2018.
For full house backup, it sort of sucks right now. They are all charging a premium over what you can otherwise get if it's not specifically a whole home product.
What I've done and would suggest is right now looking for battery banks for big ticket important items that you'd want to stay on anyways in terms of an outage. A lot of those can function as a UPS. You can get a 1kWh battery pack for $400 right now. A comparable home battery backup is charging $1300 per kWh of installed storage.
I currently have a 2kWh battery pack for my computer/server/tv and a 500Wh pack for my fridge. Works great and it's pretty reasonably priced. The 500Wh gives my fridge an extra 6 hours of runtime after a power outage.
If I wanted to power shift, I have smart switches setup so I can toggle when I want to.
You will get a battery and BMS for that price. Decent inverters are expensive, however, so you won't get a whole 10kWh setup with appropriately sized inverter for under US$2K. Probably twice that.
I hesitate to offer any brand advice, because that is very situational, depends on what you're after, what experience level you have, what trade-offs you want to make, etc.
I don't know if the market has improved but when I looked at this a year or two ago I concluded that the consumer market here was utter crap with hugely inflated prices.
The cheapest per kwh way I could find to buy a home battery (that didn't involve diy stuff) was to literally buy an EV car with an inverter... by a factor of at least two... I ended up not buying one.
Unfortunately cheap batteries doesn't translate to reputable companies packaging them in cheap high quality packages for consumers instantly.
Becoming completely dependent on imported tech for such basic needs is a BAD idea. The West cannot outcompete China on cost for these products at this time. And before you say subsidies, let me remind you that we are all going broke.
Once you have PV panels, they (on average) last 20+ years - that's not being dependant, particularly when PV panels can be mass produced anywhere.
( They do not use rare earths (inverters use trace amounts) )
China cornering rare earths (for now) is an "own goal" by every country that chose to let China (and to a lesser degree Malaysia) take a hit on the toxic by products of processing concentrates.
The US is easily capable of producing it's own rare earths, it's certainly not been backwards in asking Australia to do that for it.
We (literally, I know where some are) have 30 year old panels and 95 year old men, their existence doesn't negate an average.
Also, PV panels are kinda non uniform in performance, long term studies show that one fifth of them perform 1.5 times worse than the rest.
Either way, 20 year lifetimes where you build once and reap the rewards for 20 years is sufficient to put to rest the kind of argument being made about dependancies.
That's more than enough time for any G20 country to be making it's own PV production chain.
>Either way, 20 year lifetimes where you build once and reap the rewards for 20 years is sufficient to put to rest the kind of argument being made about dependancies.
It's not sufficient. We have had plenty of time to start making all of the critical things we import, and that never happened. In most cases, these things used to be made in the West in the first place. Just because you CAN make a thing doesn't mean it makes sense. The economics of solar would be totally different if you had to pay 5x more for solar panels to replace Chinese-subsidized slave-labor-backed imports.
There are other arguments to be made against mega-scale solar. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of solar because it is on a small scale one of the best ways for an individual to get a bit of electricity without reliance on fuel supplies. But it has a lot of disadvantages at scale which make it unsuitable for many regions. Hail, snow, dust, vandals, and strategic vulnerability all make it look precarious. The supply chain concern is that much worse.
Gotcha, you prefer to be daily dependent on fossil fuel delivery rather than get new panels every 20 years, particularly given you're in a country seemingly incapable of manufacture and minerals processing.
The US and the rest of the West are capable of manufacturing. You just said yourself they can be made "anywhere" so make up your mind. What I think is that manufacturing is not competitive in the US or the West as a whole because of wage requirements and monetary exchange rates, and additionally because we operate a mostly free market and don't penalize foreign state-subsidized products hard enough to make domestic manufacture make sense.
Replacing the solar panels every 20 years at minimum would mean that the panels would always be getting refreshed. Bro we have roads and bridges 50 years past end of life, in need of rebuilding. We can't afford this fragile power grid rebuild that is completely dependent on foreign suppliers. Sorry. Take your snark and shove it.
That is only marginally better in the scheme of things. They want to take farms for food out of commission in some places to replace with fragile and unreliable solar systems. Imagine installing this stuff on a large scale. If you plan to replace all the panels after 30 years and incur no losses from high winds, hail, vandals, etc., then you would need to overbuild the system by 20% at minimum. This is assuming modern panels are as durable as those old panels from the study too. 30 years ago, solar panels were built in the West and cost 10x as much as the ones we have now. So it seems reasonable to assume that brand new panels might not have the same characteristics, and be less durable. It would make a lot more sense to just put these panels on roofs and in parking lots where the real estate is already consumed, and the power can be a backup source instead of a grid-scale vulnerability.
That's a lot of guessing though, newer panels might as well be more durable and longer lasting. Even if you lose 20% in 20-30 years you don't need to replace the panel unless the cost of replacing them can be recouped within a reasonable amount of years. As long as there is more space for more panels you don't need to replace existing ones unless they stop working, so capacity just increases for decades until you reach some saturation point.
The real estate would be more valuable than the panels, presumably. So it's not like they can just keep expanding forever. As for the vulnerabilities, this is not based on guessing. We've produced solar panels in the West even recently. They are not competitive with China on cost. They are actually fragile. We are facing geopolitical challenges.
Obviously, money is a factor. But you cannot discount political resistance. If a government in charge is dead set in promoting fossil fuels over renewables, it will never happen. Even if you get a government led by the most gungho green friendly administration, in a democratic government, those opposing can stall any plans to go green. If you live in a less democratic government where leadership decides it's going green, you're going green.
1. Solar panels need a huge capital expenditure up front.
2. Wind power works better for farmers and provide a smaller footprint. Drive on I-80 in Iowa on a clear night and you'll see the wind farms blink their red lights in the distance. Farmers can lease their land for wind turbines, and the generation companies take on the regulatory / capital / politcal risks, etc.
3. Farming is more or less free market based, and often farmers can let their grain sit in a silo until the price is optimal for them to sell. But for a given location, there's only one power company that you can use, and typically the power companies don't like people putting solar panels on the grid. In many states (like in Idaho) there's regulatory capture or weird politics preventing people putting solar panels up on their own land. (Again Idaho)
As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
There was also a huge move by farmers towards growing corn and selling for ethanol because E-85 was seen as some future fuel. Many farmers I know went all in and switched from regional crops (this was in ND), such as sugar beets, soybeans, and spring wheat to corn to fuel this thinking this some kind of energy gold rush.
Then economics, lack of infrastructure and incentives buried it in a few years. Farmers were left holding the bag. Many were not happy they had made a huge move into this new "renewable" energy, only to get burned in the end. The same farmers I know have scoffed at windmills and solar farms.
E-85 really lost a lot of farmers willing to use their land for something that won't pan out. The ones I know went back to growing what sells and grows the best in the market. Trying to tell a farmer that solar panels on his land where he grows food to feed his family is going to be a tough sell now.
> As a side note, agriculture uses up lots of water in deserts (more so than people), so it seems like in desert spaces like Idaho, solar would make a lot more sense than agriculture would. And we should move the agriculture to where the water naturally falls from the skies.
The problem is that in many of those places where enough water naturally falls from the sky the soil and/or the weather isn't as good for growing food.
It is generally much easier to move water to a low water place that has great soil and/or weather than it is to move soil or weather to a high water place that is missing good soil or weather, and so here we are.
had the same question and after reading about it, I found there are multiple layers on each other.
Existing plans are built to run 40-60 years.. retiring creates "stranded assets". pension funds fight hard to avoid that.
The renewable projects that wait for permits exceed total existing capacity.. the bottleneck is not tech, but locality.
Based on your response timestamp I will conclude you didn't watch the video. He "does it rationally" like you requested. You said "try not to blame anyone" so if you'd rather not hear about the people who actually are to blame for this situation, then skip the last 30 minutes of the video.
It is happening. It takes time to build and it only became absurdly cheap in the past few years. But it keeps getting cheaper and better (batteries too for anyone who wants to bring that up).
Theft is stupid from a broad view. It causes more harm to the victim than benefit to the perpetrator. Everyone would be better off if we everyone stopped stealing and we provided the same level of benefit to would-be perpetrators in a more efficient form.
Why hasn't theft stopped yet? Because it's extremely difficult to do from a systems level. In principle it's simple: just don't steal. Convincing everyone to do it is hard.
Likewise, fossil fuels have horrible externalities that kill thousands if not millions of people per year. We'd be better off if we greatly cut back our usage and replaced it with cleaner sources of energy. But the people benefitting from any given use of fossil fuels and the people paying the costs tend not to be the same people. This makes it extremely difficult to organize a halt.
yes but increasing solar will damage the energy lobby in the congress and other places. It's never about what is best, it's about what's best for lobby and their puppets
What is really strange, at this period of history, how anyone would not think that solar makes more sense for focus and investment. Well, unless directly being paid not to use sense or care about the future of humanity, by various oil companies.
It's probably fairly high, considering the existence of the sodium-sulfur battery. It's not economically competitive since it operates at high temperature, but it's based on very abundant materials.
Unfortunately human energy use appears to be proportional to the amount of energy available
Hopefully we are able to reach a point of effectively unlimited cheap energy and storage but it's that if overnight we suddenly had enough solar+batteries to power today's usage, we'd suddenly need way more as demand rises
It's based on cost, like anything else. If running everything on solar and batteries makes it cheaper then we'll use more. But the same is true regardless of the technology. What's not true regardless is whether a given amount of energy usage requires continual resource extraction just to sustain it, or whether it's only needed for new capacity.
> And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
This is something the (willfully?) deluded really don't appreciate. I know people who listened to _that one Joe Rogan podcast_ about precious metal extraction for EVs and are back on the oil bandwagon. The current regime of precious metal extraction is absolutely dirty and dangerous but ... it doesn't have to be and won't be forever -- especially if, as you've said, we actively prioritize a recycling loop for the components.
I’m a lucky duck, because Microsoft ONLY sends me emails in Spanish. Password reset? Spanish. Ad? Spanish. ToS update? Spanish. When I log in, it’s English, and I’ve never been able to find any setting anywhere in my account saying to use English. It’s so funny, I can’t even understand their ads.
I think ID.me is a private company. So yeah, it’s especially fucking stupid that they use that in the first place. Any gov login should be required to go through a .gov tld. At least reverse proxy it or something!
You cannot say you’re the spiritual successor to WordPress, if your software doesn’t support running plugins out of the box on arbitrary installs. WordPress is very easy to host and scale, you only need a basic server and a CDN. A spiritual successor would follow that and also have all the new shiny stuff.
Don't be silly, this is the JS ecosystem. Why use your brain for a minute and come up with a 50 byte helper function, if you can instead import a library with 3912726 dependencies and let the compiler spend 90 seconds on every build to tree shake 3912723 out again and give you a highly optimized bundle that's only 3 megabytes small?
The problem is Claude often kinda grinds to a halt. So I find myself getting context switching a LOT as I’m waiting for it to do something. I’m alright at context switching, but it’s really fucking tiring doing it so constantly.
I had two days straight of coding sessions with codex and I haven't seen a single hitch in the weekend. With Gemini though, which I use for work, I get this exact problem. It's tiring and unproductive if the feedback loop is too short from submitting a prompt and seeing the results
It's a reflection of The Doctrine of Fascism[1] (Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile 1932). I find it important to read original works and point out when those threads resurface. Rights as a product of the state is a core belief as described by facists themselves opposed to the universal natural rights of the liberal project. You can see how rights tied to the state naturally produce an in group and out group, and an obsession of law and order, two common features of such regimes.
The original passage reads
"Fascism sees in the world not
only those superficial, material aspects in which man appears as an
individual, standing by himself, self-centered, subject to natural
law, which instinctively urges him toward a life of selfish
momentary pleasure; it sees not only the individual but the nation
and the country; individuals and generations bound together by a
moral law, with common traditions and a mission..."
There are cultures around the world that pull this off very broadly. It takes a different attitude towards work and human wellness than what we have in the US
I live in Europe, not the US, where 9-5 (more like 8-5) is common. Not everything revolves around the US you know, we are allowed to have and talk about our own issues too. And US is on the winning side here because residential AC use is more normalized there instead of accepting people will have to die from heat strokes just to "save the environment" like it is in some EU countries. 15K to 19K people died from heat strokes in summer of 2003 France. In 2022 about 10k died from heat strokes. Not great in my book when we're talking about a rich western country that has the technology and the money to prevent such deaths, but we choose not to out of environmental and regulatory idealist Martyrdom.
And I'm sure my current country of Austria won't adopt Spanish way of work and life anytime soon just because summers are hot an people don't have AC at home/work. Societies, especially the Austrian one, are incredibly stubborn to change for a variety of reasons even when the evidence and solution is right in front of you. How do I know this? Well, Covid proved we can do a lot of work from home. Did that stick? Of course not, we still have to go to the office for most white collar jobs, even IT ones, just because management said so. We don't live in a world run by proof and rationale, we live in a world run by the status quo, vibes and feelings of the boomer and asset owning class.
Relying on an energy source which requires constant, continuous resource extraction is fucking stupid when we can spend resources up front and get reliable energy (solar + battery) for decades with minimal operating cost & maintenance. And then we’ll have a recycling loop to minimize future resource extraction.
If you want to debate that, spend some time with this video first: https://youtu.be/KtQ9nt2ZeGM
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