But nuclear isn’t “renewable.” The Uranium will run out eventually…
(But yeah, it’s a really good stopgap, sustaining us when the oil runs out, which will happen a lot sooner than the Uranium running out. Also, Japan’s horror notwithstanding, nuclear energy is pretty safe, much safer than in the past.)
Don’t mean to be offensive, but can we let the math speak for itself … in other words, please post the math … unless the whole point of your OP is to say that battery technology sucks, then you’d be right … invest in vanadium mines …
step one would to be getting off our butts and building/certifying new reactor designs instead of limping along 60-year-old technology forever.
Which part, specifically, are you doubting, so I can post links.
a. Do you doubt that we can produce 100% of all energy used today with a modest fraction of total land area?
b. Do you doubt that we can store the long tail energy through synthetic fuels?
c. Do you doubt that climate change is going to eventually force us to do this?
Lots of things you could be doubting.
I doubt you can produce the energy and get it where it needs to go with the current technology using just solar and wind. I doubt you could produce all of the necessary equipment to do so as well.
I doubt you can produce enough of the materials to do this as you’ve laid out.
Yes, I doubt that climate change will force us to do things as you’ve laid out. There are better ways to do it, and I think those ways would be used before a plan such as yours. Basically, it would be easier to build a vast sun shade or other orbital megastructures than what you are proposing, and I think those are pretty far down the list of practical solutions.
Basically, you are proposing to replace all the cars, all of the power infrastructure, build a new power infrastructure based on two forms of energy that are the least scalable and build a storage system that would already be vastly overstrained by just doing the first thing on the above list. It’s sort of like going to breakfast at Milliways…
Well, your doubts are clearly based upon a cloud of pure ignorance. It is apparent you have literally not even tried to work this out on a napkin.
So, yes, solar is all you need : Elon Musk Wants to Power the US Off of Solar - Business Insider
The “materials required” are actually just glass (sand) and lead trihalide. For the panels. And obviously, aluminum for the conductors.
Can you envision a robotic system making sheets of glass coated with lead trihalide by the square kilometer? Because that’s a straightforward task any number of automation firms could put together on contract. That’s what I meant by automating production. And we already have automated circuit board assemblers and have been using them for decades (for the inverters).
Ok, now the batteries. Some major types of lithium battery do not use rare materials. I can link you a book on how to engineer an electric car, lithium iron phosphate batteries do work, though they don’t give you as good a range as the type used in Teslas. Also, lithium is far more common than you might think.
Ok, now the motors. Some…politically motivated speakers…have made a big deal out of how the preferred type of motor used in modern industry today, the permanent magnet brushless DC motor, needs pounds of rare earths for the magnets in the motors. Well, for a little more in electronics, you can build motors with almost no rare earths at all. (just a teensy amount in the actual electronics, actually). That’s what the Model S uses, though for the Model 3, they went back to the rare earth requiring motor type.
Finally, I never meant an overnight conversion, that would be crazy. Nor would it be a forced tech choice by the government. No, you’d simply prove on paper and with prototypes that it is possible to do it this way, then pass some type of carbon fee. (carbon taxes or cap and trade). You would then ramp up that fee over 30 years, smoothly increasing the rate until a level calculated to bring net emissions to zero. (at a certain level of carbon tax, say $100 a ton, you could have another company absorb a ton of carbon, convert it to plastic, and bury it. Beyond that point, any carbon emitter is just going to buy an offset from that company. Tax would be applied at the highest level possible, probably on the actual fuel refineries, to prevent most cheating)
The market would then decide the exact mix of technologies used to become carbon free. Maybe nuclear would be a part of it, though I strongly doubt that.
I’m reposting this because it makes the most sense by far. Revamping all of our energy infrastructure just because it might be better for some far off generation will never happen. There’s not enough motivation or impetus. And a huge part of the reason for that is that there is a stupendous amount of work that needs to be done in order for “the math” part of it to work.
IMO, it’s human nature to overlook these details. Here is a thread I started on self-replicating space probes. Think of all of the technologies and related infrastructure components that are required to build not just a space probe but one that could carry all of that related infrastructure with it so it could then replicate it off in the cosmos somewhere. Yet within a couple of posts all that was essentially hand-waved away by explaining that “the elements you need the most of are found in big chunks around stars.”
I don’t know enough to say with certainty if your idea will work one way or the other, but I do know that whether it will work in theory or not will demand a lot more resources than you are allowing for. And human nature being what it is, no one is going to pony up for it until it’s easier and potentially more profitable.
A large part of human innovation is problem solving. A heavy universal carbon tax will create that problem. And drafting those bills will be a heck of a lot easier to do.
What I’m doubting is that you have any math to back up your claims … at all …
a. You would leave a billion people in the dark? … let’s start by providing all the world’s population with the same energy consumption as Western Europe or the United States …
b. I’ve acknowledged your position on energy storage … that’s a tough problem to solve …
c. Hell yeah … I’m an unashamed climate change denialist … point to a place on Earth and tell me how the climate is changing … pouring as much concrete out in the desert like you think is a good idea will fuck up that environment more than a few degrees of temperature … talk about the cure being worse than the affliction … do you have any idea how much mercury vapor is released during the manufacturing of cement? …
Phaw … let’s see your numbers … I do not believe solar/wind/hydro can replace fossil fuels without draconian conservation measures …
Numbers are linked in a post above. If you are a denialist you obviously are either not literate or poorly educated or simply incompetent*, unfortunately, so I’m not really interested in a discussion. You had plenty of chances to research your position, and if you had done so, you would have learned that there is basically no evidence backing up your position, while there is a literal mountain of evidence, supported by almost every credible scientist in the entire world in the field, that climate change is real, happening, is mostly due to CO2, and is human-caused.
*I don’t mean it as an insult. But you’re basically taking a “flat earth” intellectual position, and the only genuine flat earthers are either so poorly educated they are totally unaware of, well, everything including spacecraft and satellites and the limitations of computer graphics, or they are mentally ill.
Is this gonna be on the test?
Another option for liquid fuel storage is ammonia, which does not have to be refrigerated to keep it in a liquid state.
Yeah, or ethanol. You grasp the technical reason why you have to store the energy as fuels, then? A lot of the com-mentors here don’t seem to even be aware of, well, anything in the subject…
No, they’re not …
Yeah, you lost interest as soon as I called your bullshit … “The math says we can produce 100% of all energy needs this way” … okay, let’s see the math, not just throwing numbers around … use division and addition and the like …
If you can’t point to a place on Earth and say how the climate is changing there … then your condemnations of my position are based on a complete lack of knowledge of even what climate is … mine is a well-researched albeit conservative position, this 3ºC temperature increase over 100 years is very small and doesn’t change continentality nor prevailing winds … at best we’ll see a little extra rainfall, but that’s a good thing …
My math is derived from the Stefan-Boltzmann grey-body equation … yes, man-kind’s activities are reducing emissivity; however, this effects temperature by the inverse fourth root … such a small change doesn’t make temperate climates anything but temperate climates, the wind will blow from the west for the foreseeable future …
Clearly, you have no understanding of the carbon footprint of concrete …
I linked articles that clearly state they can be produced. Climate change is measurable and shows right up in the data. And given it only takes a small change in planetary temperature to make most of the Earth uninhabitable, that 4th power term doesn’t help as much as you think.
Actually, I did. 
That article is full of fluff and light on details.
No, that’s not all the ‘materials required’. Do you think that you simply put up the panels and then the electricity magically flows from the plant to the houses? Let’s say we take Elon’s idea…all we need is a 100 mile by 100 mile square in ‘Nevada or Texas or Utah’. Ok…how do we get the electricity from Nevada, Texas or Utah to, oh, say LA? Or New York? Or Chicago? Magic fairies?
Basically, he’s just using this as an example, not a practical engineering and business model that we could do in reality. The answer is you couldn’t just erect such a structure in a location like that and power the country. It’s not possible without some sort of superconducting power grid, and building even a regular grid (leaving aside the loss) would cost trillions.
Sure, you could probably do it, though I think the engineering and business challenges are something you are glossing over. But the devil is in the details, which you handwave away with a fluff piece (I assume because it has Musk in it). You could build the panels. But it’s all the other stuff that goes with it, and the fact that you can’t just build a big central plant in the desert to power the country. Even in your fluff article he is talking about starting with rooftop solar (which, btw, his solar company will be happy to sell to you today and which I happen to have on my own house). But that’s no solution because the scale of just doing that is beyond any of the current companies in any sort of short time frame. If you want to do this in, oh, say 100 years, sure…that could happen. But building rooftop solar for every building and structure in the US in, oh, say a decade? That probably isn’t possible and would cost a hell of a lot (125 million times $10k for solar for a home…and that’s way less than the current cost btw. That would be $1.25 trillion. Also, the 125 million is just for homes…if you want to do buildings too you are going to double or triple that. Even at $1000 per home it’s $125 billion dollars).
Show me the numbers. How many batteries would it take to both have backup for the grid AND for all the cars? What’s the current production scale for, say, Tesla…and what’s the gap between current capabilities and the target? How many tons per battery of just lithium? What’s the current global lithium production? And, again, what’s the gap between current production and target production? I did this math already, but since I’m just ignorant feel free to show me how this would work.
As for lithium being more common, that’s sort of true. But it’s also environmentally damaging to mine or very costly to do so if you are going to worry about stuff like environmental damage. Ramping up production to do what you are proposing would be…challenging. Again, it depends on your time frame. Are you talking about doing all of this in a century or two or a decade or two?
Just a simple question…what’s the current global production of vehicles of all types, and what is your time frame? We won’t even talk about the relative handful of cars Tesla produces a year, let’s go with number of cars of all type produced annually and pretend that all the car manufacturers could just switch production to all electric vehicles in a year. What would it take to replace just the cars currently on the road? Feel free to show your work.
Well, that would have been good to know. So, you envision something that will take 30 years of transition then will start to really clamp down? I think for the all electric car proposition it might be doable. For moving even the US to all solar I don’t believe it would be possible, but if you’d like to show me the math I’m all ears. I do think that tinkering with market forces is the way to go, but I don’t believe that it would work trying to dictate the end result would be any better than countries that attempt to use command economies work out well. If you basically just say that emissions of CO2 or other GhG are going to be increasingly costly then let the market figure out how to solve the issue I think you’d get better results…probably a mixes system of solar where it actually works well, wind (same), nuclear and other energy systems that are either cleaner than today for transition or are niche.
But the thing is, to do what you want to do, even over a longer time scale is going to also increase environmental damage and CO2 and other GhG emissions. To scale up mining operations is going to entail a lot of impact. Building the plants and distribution is going to be the same. Just to replace the vehicles around the world today (over a billion and a half) would be a major challenge and have a huge impact.
The only technology we have today that can actually scale up to take a serious bite out of CO2 at the power generation level is nuclear.
The technology to do this and others certainly exists. Whichever you choose, it’s expensive. And the infrastructure takes time to build. Without crunching any numbers whatsoever I would favor ammonia over carbon-based liquids that rely on direct air capture of carbon dioxide simply because 70% is one heckofalot easier to work with than 400 ppm. But of course there are many other factors to consider, e.g. transmission/distribution, already-existing infrastructure, etc., so our MMV.
So the actual basis for your opinion which you feel strongly about is that since we produce commodity X at a rate of P, today, scaling it up to 1000P is impossible in 30 years.
That’s all you have to say. You don’t care that the metals are there, that we have just invented a really cool form of machine intelligence that should make feasible to automate almost every manufacturing job in the world well within 30 years, that we already replace most of our industrial base every 30 years anyway. You just want to feel comfortable in your bubble of doubt.
Well, fine. I don’t see any point in discussing this further, the basis of your doubts are trivially obviously wrong.
World-wide energy generation? Hell yeah. 1000 times the current world’s energy production, in 30 years? Not only impossible, but damned impossible!
(Would we even be able to find ways to use that much energy?)
(I’m disagreeing with one specific case; there might very well be other particular commodities that could be scaled up 1000 times. Reproductions of the Mona Lisa, for instance.)
Seems to have become a common theme in your arguments …
When you get around to reading about past climates, please note that during the mid-Cretaceous, global average temperatures were 15º-20ºC higher than today, the world was hardly uninhabitable then … look at the dinosaur fossils being found in Alaska: “Dinosaur discovery in Alaska: A duck-billed herbivore that didn’t fear the snow” - Los Angeles Times - Apr 7th, 2015
Why no. But it’s a basis for the scale. Since you’ve chosen not to even attempt to answer with anything more than the same snide horseshit, I am guessing you now realize (and have actually bothered to look) how silly your assertions were.
No, I want to have you defend your position and answer some of the questions I’ve asked. You seem disinclined to do so. I’m militantly unsurprised. What you seem to want is a circle jerk of folks who blindly accept your assertions and don’t ask any questions, just say ‘Yes SamuelA, it is totally feasible!’ But, the thing is, it isn’t because reality. To do what you are proposing isn’t feasible. Solar just won’t scale up to meet 100% of our energy needs in the real world the rest of us live in, as opposed to a theoretical discussion about it’s maximum potential. I get that this reality stuff is something you’d rather handwave away and not deal with. Which is why you attempted an appeal to authority with the fluff piece from your OP and have presented dick all to support your conjectures.
Oh, we could go over the details, but since you aren’t willing to do a fucking thing I don’t see the point in digging into this non-debate.
Do you actually believe that anyone on this board is buying your bullshit? Feel free to PM Stranger or one of the other engineers on the board and ask them what they think of your OP and it’s feasibility.
Or just continue to think you are making real, solid points with your fantasy and that, sure, it’s both feasible and possible because you want it to be instead of the horseshit and mocking you think is helping your position. When come back, bring…well, anything.