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by kkfx 1566 days ago
Hum, perhaps I was a bit unclear: I think anyone, at any actual realistic scale, can't live with p.v. and eolic. The Sun shine around the globe, of course, so IF we have an hypothetical global superconductive network we can get "constant enough" p.v. and with the same network distribute eolic power around the world, but the if condition is not met: we do not have air-temperature superconductivity at scale nor such a giant global network.

Deploy p.v. at grid scale, not counting the cost, probably means covering the need of many countries in the world during a certain amount of hours/day, that's ok, I'm not really sure how much can scale even in theory but probably it can, however we have 24/7/365 activities that must never stop from hospitals to military passing through countless of enterprises, services etc and we can't power them from lithium storage... So regardless of the economical meaning we can't live on renewable IMVHO...

That's the biggest point: we still have nuclear, it's not really renewable so far, we do not have fusion, but some say we still can run much more nuclear than today before running out of uranium. There is the radioactive wastes issue, still unsolved, but apparently it's manageable and except in case of accidents there is essentially no pollution. Here came my point: nuclear work best at a constant peace witch means that to have energy in the night we still have energy in the day, at that's point why investing in p.v. etc? Just to diversify seems a bit expensive done at a grid scale...

A possible explanation is: yes, we can develop enough nuclear to supply energy for critical usage, but not much more, so we still need other sources, in that case p.v. and eolic might be an interesting option, that's seems convinced IF we can recycle batteries at minimum at 95% or so, witch means we can run a society on trains (electric) and e.v. limiting oil usage to things we do not know how to do otherwise. But again this might came, but so far is not there, so far pushing e.v. seems to be suicidal: we buy vehicles that last 5-8 years, have essentially zero resale value and we do not even know if we will recycle them or not nor if we can built enough batteries for anyone...

So New Urban Agenda? Most people stuck in modern concentration camps named prisons pardon, smart cities, to consume less and just few, rich enough to afford that new old lifestyle, outside benefiting from the hard work of those who live to work in prisons^Wcities? How can possibly a society like that can stay alive? Even if the élite-people separation works and people remain calm and productive, there is no much freedom to develop intelligence, to evolve, we have had élite-people separated society in the past, works for the élite for a certain period of time, but does not really scale. A certain degree of separation is a thing, the Great Reset level of separation is simply unsustainable in the medium run, not counting the long one.

IMHVO the real problem is that modern tech demand an extremely big quantity of people just to exists, and that's means and extremely big quantity of resources. The sole way to make it more efficient (less resource intensive) is erase the economic competition and doing so in the "new deal" way means creating a dictatorship that can't work, like Chinese one that works just because it exists in a context, not alone in the world.

1 comments

Ignoring the rest of your comment you don’t need a superconducting network to move power around the globe. China just built a 3,300km 1,100KV DC line to move 12GW east or west with less than 10% losses. You can play with the geometry but no city on the earth is more than ~7,000km from sunlight, which would mean at most ~20% losses ignoring the ocean.

However, that’s incredibly wasteful vs building local battery storage. Especially by the time we need it, globally only 3% of electricity is from solar it’s going to be 20+ years before storage is an issue and batteries are already being built for large scale grid storage.

You can play with adoption curves but approximately 3.5 million more EV’s where built in 2021 than 2020. That took an incredible investment in battery factories and the trend is only going in one direction.

So far, from EV "data" (between " because I've read of them, not having them nor being able to really know how trustable they are) modern LiIon (i.e. LiFePo batteries) last 5 year of intense usage, 8 if the usage is less intense. And so far we are unable to recycle lithium batteries (while we almost entirely recycle classic plomb ones), productive capacity from raw materials yet unknown so we actually do not even know if we can build batteries for all on scale and for how many years since lithium itself is not so rare, but not so abundant.

Beside that my home can run on battery, my car probably can for most of it's usage (i.e. not counting long range trips) but trucks can't, yes we can build a classic EU 18m+ truck on batteries, only it halve it's load capacity and almost double the route time. We can push railroads of course, in the past in EU there were far more railroads than now (just http://carfree.fr/img/2015/06/sncf.jpg as an example) but that demand energy, in quantity.

IMVHO choosing nuclear for "industry and critical appliance" is mandatory, but in that case there is little interest for large renewable deploy, I do not see any other option: you can't run a solar panel factory on solar just as an example: it demand too much energy. You can't run an aluminum foundry on solar, you can't produce/recycle much glass on solar etc.

About EV adoption: yes they grow, following the high price of oil and the growth of domestic p.v. personally if I decide to buy an EV in most cases I can power it for free, unfortunately such EV is absurdly expensive and have exactly zero resale value so compared to classic ICE vehicle is an extremely overpriced crap... Of course if the trend will continue, since I need a car I'll have no other logical choices but that's far from being really convenient nor environmental friendly nor sustainable.

EV’s have high resale values. 2017 Model 3 long range with 55k miles is selling for 40k. https://www.carfax.com/vehicle/5YJ3E1EA3HF001873

We don’t have a lot of data on really old EV’s but 10 year old model S’s are retaining around 40% of their initial prices which is really good for such expensive cars.

Some of that’s the limited stock of used cars right now, but it’s really inexpensive cars that are seeing the largest bump more expensive cars are closer to normal prices.

As to battery degradation, that varies wildly with chemistry your cellphone doesn’t use the same battery technology as an EV.