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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: December 30th, 2021

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  • China still burns more coal every year than every single other country on earth put together.

    This matters a lot, because it doesn’t matter that you’re “using electricity” if it’s coming from a big ol’ coal pollution factory.

    In some ways, it’s preferable to directly use the coal in some applications – changing from chemical energy to thermal to movement to electricity back to thermal energy can be less efficient than just changing the chemical energy to thermal energy and using that directly.




  • Except that that solar farm doesn’t produce energy at night, so you’d need batteries to smooth out the power. If you used lead acid batteries because they are highly recyclable, you’re looking at 2.4 million tonnes of batteries for a 24 hour backup, and they need to be replaced once every 30 years(however more likely 10 years since such a battery backup would be used in a cycling application), and the 4GW nuclear power plant will put out close to 4GW all the time but the solar farm will only produce 4GW of energy for about an hour a day, so you’d need a 20GW solar plant to produce continuous energy equivalent to a 4GW nuclear plant in conditions like northern Europe or the northern US.

    Other battery chemistries can be used, but have trade-offs in recyclability, availability, and materials required – for the lead acid batteries you need lead, sulphuric acid, and some form of plastic, but for other batteries you need exotic materials which are much more difficult to acquire.

    Scale and intermittency screw up all the math and nobody really considers those factors. It’s fine for a single household which lives based on what is available at the moment, but industrial scale breaks a lot of things – like ethanol fuels.

    That’s where base load generation like hydroelectric or geothermal are highly beneficial, because they work 24/7/365 and don’t need to be oversized and don’t need massive storage solutions. There is a legitimate criticism that they aren’t available everywhere, but the reality is that environment was in has to be local, and so you have to make use of the resources that are available. If there isn’t enough generating capacity in a region for a bunch of people, they’re probably just shouldn’t be that many people there you want to be in equilibrium with nature.





  • Of issues I have with solar, “we won’t be able to farm” isn’t one of them. The amount of space required for even gigawatt level solar farms is relatively trivial. I think I did the math and it was like 30km square or something, which is enough to convince a lot of greens it’s a bad choice because it’s big and ugly, but on a map isnt really that that much.


  • Of issues I have with solar, “we won’t be able to farm” isn’t one of them. The amount of space required for even gigawatt level solar farms is relatively trivial. I think I did the math and it was like 30km square or something, which is enough to convince a lot of greens it’s a bad choice because it’s big and ugly, but on a map isnt really that that much.



  • Well, one thing to keep in mind is that most people haven’t been buying cars.

    My car is starting to get older, and my plan right now is to continue maintaining it because compared to the cost of replacing it the cost of keeping it is so much lower. And I’m not doing that bad. Most households are doing a lot worse than I am, and so they’re probably looking at the astronomical prices of vehicles post covid and making the completely reasonable decision not to get anything.

    So it’s easy for 90% of the vehicles sold to be electric because most of the vehicles being sold are luxury items for the rich rather than things that individuals need to live day to day.