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by palata 746 days ago
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.

1 comments

> 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.