Historically, how have we fixed it? At the turn of the last century, over 90% of US jobs were in agriculture. Today it’s less than 3%. Who is able to buy goods and services today, since we lost all those jobs?
I’m not trying to belittle your point, as it’s valid, to a degree. But these arguments were the same ones used for literally the last 2 centuries of automation, yet here we are. My WAG is that human labor will always be in demand to do something, even if we have AI that can do the stuff you are proposing (which we don’t, currently) and machines that can do all of the jobs humans do today (same). From my own reading, it seems that machines and humans working together (sort of like the idea of not just having solar everywhere but where it makes the most sense ;)) work better than either alone, since both do something better than the other.
I’m not denying that solar has gotten cheaper, I’m simply saying that you cherry picked the low ball you continue to use and that it’s generally more expensive than that. Is it cheaper than nuclear? Sure…if you don’t count the ability to work at night or when the sun isn’t shining, as well as a bunch of other factors, including the lifetime of a nuclear plant verse a solar panel. The costs are totally different though so it’s kind of apples to oranges comparison, and you have to squint and hope for ignorance to try and make it a one for one across the board comparison.
Ironically, one could say this about anything. Well, we can’t use the prices of nuclear today because we don’t know how that would change if we simply allowed them to be built without the delays and with new designs and new materials and new automation and expert systems. We don’t know that fusion isn’t about to become the big thing either, so maybe if we are going to wait for all this stuff you are on about we should just wait for that, since it’s as likely as the levels of automation you are talking about happening AND being put into production to the level we could build a worldwide solar power system AND mining AND electric car switchover in the same time frame (i.e. starting over the next 30 years).
The thing is, we could be building nuclear power facilities today, along with solar, wind and the others, and decommissioning coal fired power plants…and we’d actually be making a difference, say, 10 years from now, instead of starting in 30 (with a large CO2 spike doing it and the benefits happening on the back end of 30-50 years).
Sure, and I didn’t go into the biggest part of that ‘liability’ either, being that it’s really the risk and the long-term tying up of the capital before the ROI is met that kills nuclear in the current climate. Even if we took away the ability of the anti-nuclear folks to delay projects until they die it would still be an issue. Nuclear plants are cost loaded such that all the costs are front-loaded, so you don’t get a return on investment for years or even a decade or two, while a coal plant starts giving you a return in a much shorter period of time. So does solar. This gets exacerbated by the anti-nuclear strategy of interminable delays in the project until it finally dies.
There were predictions both nuclear and fusion would eventually be ‘too cheap to meter’.
I’m not directly comparing the two situations. And I applaud you recognizing that ‘solar is cheaper’ is as now only true (in certain relatively favorable places) where it’s a relatively small % of installed capy the grid can do without when it has to. Wind also. Storage is the huge issue. Proposals for massive super-grids are probably more pie in the sky than economical distributed storage, but anyway neither is here right now and not predictable when/if they will be.
I’m not saying that will never change. If market forces make renewables actually the cheapest, for say 50% or 80% of energy needs (including replacing oil in transportation etc) not a potential to be around 20-ish% of avg electrical generation for today’s use of electricity as they are now, that will be awesome. When and if.
The biggest problem I see is that as we bring these new and improved renewable energy sources on-line, we’ll just use more energy and not shut down the fossil fuel power plants … we need local communities badgering their local utility to stop purchasing fossil fuel fired electricity off the wholesale market … it cost us an extra 2¢ per kW-hr to make sure we were getting all the wind power we could … kills birds but birds are nasty anyway … heaps of bird carcasses keep the coyotes out of the herds …
There’s a natural end of life to any power generating facility, so our existing plants will close and are closing. But yes the economics are much more challenging if you want to build new capacity *and *shutter trillions of dollars of entrenched capital prematurely.
You can look at EIA’s monthly generator inventory to look at closures. IIRC 2/3 of closed capacity in 2015 was coal.
Fun fact, mining coal plant ash piles has been suggested as a feasible source of Uranium for nuclear power.
Thousands, probably a few hundreds of thousands die each and every year from air pollution caused by fossil fuel power plants, but one technician stubs a toe in a nuclear plant and OH MY GOD the sky is falling.
Talking about death and suffering, what happens in the solar utopia when, let’s say utopian Puerto Rico gets pummeled by a hurricane like last time?
Regarding solar I seldom hear about that part of the equation, and considering how energy intensive making the things is, it is a very important part.
IIRC the energy break even point for solar is 10 to 15 years; as an anecdote a German friend of mine told me his parents made a solar installation at home, heavily subsidized by the government, it broke down after three years, so it was effectively a very elaborate waste of energy.
By the way, last time I was in Germany I saw lots and lots of solar farms… covered in snow. :smack:
Solar makes sense in many places and situations, but peddling it as a cure all for all energy problems is ludicrous.
Right now PR’s problem is the main power plants can run but the transmission lines are down.
Distributed solar would reduce a bunch of that. Centralized solar would have the same problem as centralized conventional generation.
Clearly the panels (whether central or distributed) would need to be designed for the local threats. Whether that’s to withstand high winds or to shed snow or to not topple in earthquakes depends on where you are.
Recent experience proves our whole energy infrastructure is not as resilient as we wish it was. As we replace stuff in the normal course it would be smart to make it more robust. Whether “cheaper now” will win out over “cheaper in the longer run” remains to be seen.
And you would be one of the top energy engineering experts who’s opinion on this would make the most impact…though the OP will almost certainly handwave that away and tell you that you don’t know enough on the subject to be taken seriously.
I’m certainly handwaving away his response. Maybe he is a top engineering expert, and maybe he isn’t, but even if he were the smartest acknowledged man in the world, I’d want to see his work. I’m not asking for a 50 page analysis…just a napkin estimate of the numbers. Why does he think that synthetic fuel won’t scale as a solution to this problem? Why does he think that renewable energy won’t scale? How does he explain the power-law dropoffs observed to date if he believes it won’t scale.
Hell, I don’t even “believe” in my point, all I have wanted are a fair, reasonable analysis instead of the 3 pages of mostly bogus character attacks (sent both ways, to be fair) we’ve got here.
You should be disappointed in Una Persson’s efforts here. They do not support your case. If the situation were reversed and you were arguing in favor of something (maybe the benefits of leafy green vegetables?), and Qadgap the Mercoden just came in here and said he “didn’t think very much of the veggies”, would you feel he had addressed the issue suitably? Even though, as an MD he’s definitely got some authority on his side, it’s not like there’s no evidence that maybe leafy greens are good for humans.
Indeed, all we’ve seen so far is a lot of “whataboutism,” claims with no real backing at all, etc. The OP is almost like one of my students asking me to do their homework for them.
Once one assumes exponential growth in self-replicating self-learning machines all imaginable problems are reduced to trivial in a comparatively short time.
There’s just two problems left: 1) Inventing those things. 2) Getting all the pesky humans who don’t agree or have a vested interest in the status quo out of the way.
Of course, once you’ve solved 1) the machines will soon enough decide for themselves how to handle 2). It won’t be pretty (for us meatbags).
Returning to the OP’s underlying claim writ small, there is some back of envelope merit.
IF you can produce and install nearly costless PV panels of reasonable efficiency, THEN you can produce nearly costless electricity. Once it’s nearly costless, you can afford to waste vast amounts of it in inefficient processes that store it chemically. And because all that stuff can also be created nearly costlessly, that’s not much of an obstacle to adoption either.
So once [del]magic[/del] future tech has erased costs, the only question becomes does the total insolation on some presently unused tracts of desert multiplied by all our assumed inefficiencies, exceed the current or projected demand for energy in all forms by humans everywhere. If yes, declare provisonal success. Run some more calcs on whether any obvious other resource beyond insolation and desert land area would be in short supply v. Earth’s endowment. e.g. rare earths, aluminum for long distance wiring, etc. If not, declare complete success.
Where the OP’s claim writ *large *seems to me to really go off the rails is when it jumps from “this will be possible” to “since it will be possible, it’s therefore both inevitable and good.” Sometimes the OP has argued this and other times he seems to deny he’s arguing this. But ISTM that’s the thing that really got folks’ backs up.
The path of history is insanely contingent. Huge numbers of excellent ideas never come to pass or develop weedlike in ways we never intended. Based on what we know today, a securityless anonymous fully trusting internet was a bad idea. But here we are, in maximum Band-Aid mode, perhaps for centuries to come.
By the way, lest anyone get the wrong impression from my previous post: I am a big fan of nuclear power, and think that it’s underutilized and should be installed a lot more. But I’m also a big fan of wind power, and think it’s also underutilized and should be installed a lot more. And I’m also a fan of solar, and think it should be developed further. And I’m a really big fan of hydroelectic generation, and the only reason we’re not installing more of that is that we’re already very close to saturation on it.
Too often, people get lost looking for THE SOLUTION to a problem. And if something can’t completely solve a problem, it’s abandoned. But usually, there isn’t any one THE SOLUTION, and the real solution consists of a whole bunch of partial solutions put together. No one power source needs to meet all of our needs: We just need a set of power sources that add together to equal our needs. And a decrease in our needs is just as good as an increase in supply of the same amount (or, likely, better, if the supply has any negative side effects, which it almost always does). So bring on the uranium piles, and bring on the wind turbines, and the cheaper, more efficient solar panels, and the better home insulation, and the smart meters, and all the rest of it. We don’t have to pick and choose: We’ll take all of it.
I think you can see ample evidence in this thread of a key problem with your plan - democracy.
Maybe YOU want to do this, but many people don’t. And for good reasons. This kind of all-or-nothing plan makes no sense. A mix of generation is important for many reasons - reliability, cost, infrastructure needs, safety, etc.
A gradual improvement in generation sources is what is needed. Incentives for the kinds of generation that is cheaper, more reliable and cleaner should be (and are) offered. Over time, generation is improved. There is no end point. For instance, what if a new technology is found that makes coal generation much cleaner? Shouldn’t we pursue the creation of cheap clean coal power generation at that point? Forcing all generation to be what you decide is best may look good to you today, but could look foolish in the future.
As an aside, my main objection to nuclear power is the timescales involved. Sure, maybe we have good processes in place to deal with the waste today (which I don’t agree with), but what about a hundred years in the future, when this stuff is still incredibly dangerous? 500 years? 1000 years? No other power source concentrates such a high risk into such a small area. I can’t support such a technology.
Pretty much. But it doesn’t have to be costless. 1/10 current costs would also be cheap enough for this logic to work out. And I, as I look at my Reinforcement Learning homework and work through the details of how a robotic agent could work with the latest methods, think that 1/10 current costs is a reality. As in, no possible future short of a nuclear war will mean we won’t see that huge reduction in manufacturing costs within 20 years. The economic incentives are enormous, and this stuff works, and has the potential of being made to work no matter the edge case (because swarms of robots can share neural state updates with each other and thus when one robot solves an edge case, all of them will be able to solve the same edge case). An edge case solution is an optimal policy for a given situation. A situation is the present state of the environment the robot is considering, after a lot of of processing. (so a sharp rock on the ground in front of the robot is the same situation even if the rock is slightly different in size). You know you have an optimal policy when you have reached a local minima for a solution to that policy, and you can determine if you are at the local minima using fairly basic methods…
It doesn’t require any particular startup or nation to succeed - all the major powers are investing in it, massively. It gives an immediate ROI, the moment you can make a robot do a job that would otherwise take a person, and if the robot rental cost per hour is less than the person’s total wage, boom, you have made some money.
