[palata]

> Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument.

Again, you don't understand. I am not just saying that we don't have the infrastructure. I am saying that the size of the infrastructure we would need is a whole lot bigger than what you must imagine if you think that renewables can produce 99% of the world's energy.

You just vastly underestimate the problem. Saying "look, I went from selling 10 devices last year to 100 this year, so this proves that in 10 years I will be selling 1000000000000 devices per year" is the kind of reasoning you use in a startup when talking to a VC. But when you're being serious about solving a problem, it doesn't work like that.

Let me repeat it one last time: we will go away from fossil fuels, it's not a choice (they are limited in nature). We will need as much fission and renewables as we can get to compensate for as much as we can, but that won't remotely be enough (again, think about a real big merchant boat and tell me how it travels around the world without fossil fuels - not the startup way, but with a real solution).

So on top of fission and renewables, we need sobriety. A ton of it. And it means clever engineering across the board. So instead of wasting talents doing AI or polluting more with SpaceX, they should work on solving the actual problems we have for tomorrow.

[Retric]

3% of the worlds electricity per year isn’t several orders of magnitude from solving the problem. When I say that’s on pace to hit 100% carbon free grid before 2050 I’m not assuming crazy growth in anything.

We’re past the crazy exponentials. Global demand is still increasing every year by ~2.2% but that already includes the EV and Heat pump transition.

350GW last year, 356GW in 2024, 362GW in 2025 etc and before you know it we are done. Except 2024 is on pace to massively exceed that estimate, ~500GW looks more likely.

[palata]

Again it's all startup talk. I never mentioned orders of magnitude, I mentioned complexity. You keep focusing on what already uses electricity, ignoring the fact that 80% of the energy we use is NOT electricity.

And you still haven't answered my question: how do you power a big merchant boat with electricity? Do you realize it doesn't work with batteries, or not? And do you realize that the merchant boats ARE globalization? We don't have a technical solution for that, not even as a proof of concept. And most certainly not with renewables.

[Retric]

> 80% of the energy we use is NOT electricity

99% of the energy used by mankind is sunlight, but obviously we aren’t aiming for accuracy here.

Your 80% as fossil fuels is half (coal, natural gas) which are mostly used to make electricity and therefore goes away on a renewable grid on its own. In essence you are double counting the inefficiency of fossil fuels as if it was somehow a positive. People do use some natural gas for heating and cooking, but there’s direct swap in replacements that use electricity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum....

“40%” is oil though again that’s what’s pumped out of the ground not what’s actually used as fuel. Subtract EV’s and year really talk about 10% “of the worlds energy” used in boats and aircraft.

> big merchant boat with electricity.

New boats can run 100% hydrogen out of the gate.

Container ships don’t actually last that long, but you can also retrofit existing engines to run 85% on hydrogen fairly easily.