[haccount]

Make a cost calculation of how much solar and battery you need to keep your lights on during peak summer and then do the same calculation for how much solar and battery you need to keep the lights on in the middle of winter when a large scale 5 day blizzard.

Pretend you are a metal foundry.

Good luck.

[ZeroGravitas]

Okay, I'm moving my metal foundry to a location that's sunny all year round, just like I've previously moved it to Iceland for geothermal or next to big hydro dams. Cheap energy makes it worthwhile.

[haccount]

"Solar is viable if we depopulate the temperate zones"

Great argument for an energy source

[ben_w]

Not what they said.

You do seem to be developing a habit of arguing against what you want others to have written instead of what they actually wrote.

That's not going to be effective here.

[pydry]

The fact that you can do this and still be a bit cheaper for those periods than nuclear power is what makes it really ridiculous:

https://theecologist.org/2016/feb/17/wind-power-windgas-chea...

Of course, we'll never stop building nuclear power in spite of this because it provides indirect subsidies for the military.

[chickenbig]

That windgas study is rather poor. I responded to that a few months ago in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834377#40853888

[ben_w]

Big fat wire to somewhere which isn't in a blizzard.

Or just build the metal foundry in the non-blizzard-prone area in the first place, because the blizzard takes out power lines even if there was a nuclear reactor on the other end.

I've done the maths, and I'd it wasn't for geopolitics, China makes enough Aluminium to make an HVDC grid so thick that it would have so little resistance that they could usefully connect every grid in the world for a cost of 250e9 USD for the Aluminium.

Scaled down to just the USA, no international stuff, it's something you can easily do if someone convinces Trump or Musk to delete any internal obstruction.

[actionfromafar]

Your last sentence sounds optimistic. Load-bearing "easily". Any convincing needs to demonstrate that also the "libs are owned".

[ben_w]

If they need to make it a culture war thing, they could just call it the Keystone pipeline of electricity, or the Trump Powerline, or similar.

(As a non American, I may be misjudging this: I don't care too much about US culture wars, they don't connect to me any more than the US or Chinese sports teams whose names I don't know).

You may be correct that I am over-optimistic, though for what it's worth my optimism is not universal to all of the aspects of Musk let alone Trump (mostly pessimistic about him), and not with regard to other greenhouse gas emissions besides electrical, heating, and transportation.

[haccount]

"Thousands of miles of big wires are free"

Why don't we just assume that power will be free and infinite and plug our grid into that assumption? We can even write it down on the socket and paint it green, based on how these arguments always read out that's the only thing needed to maintain electrified high tech society.

[ben_w]

Me: "world for a cost of 250e9 USD for the Aluminium"

You: "Thousands of miles of big wires are free"

If anywhere's going to get mixed up between "250 billion dollars" and "free", it's going to be politics.

[haccount]

>"If we buy nuclear power plants on Temu we can have a 1GW reactor for $1000, but most likely it will be on sale (lucky us!) so it's actually more like $400 per reactor. And if we use green thorium then the fuel is $2.50 for ten years"

I reconstructed your argument to be in favor of nuclear power, and because I mentioned Temu as a source it actually have an infinite amount of more ties to reality than your story did.

Wow no wonder people like to argue for green energy if it's this easy to make up arguments for it

[ben_w]

You've done as bad a job of that as GPT-2. Not ChatGPT, just 2.

You can very easily look up the resistivity of aluminium, which will tell you that if you want a loop around the equator to have a resistance of one ohm over that length, it needs to be about a square metre cross section. You can look up the density and the cost, too. You get around 250 billion dollars depending on the exact market price when you were looking it up.

[haccount]

You suggest buying 100 million metric ton of aluminium when the global annual production is 70 million. And magically you'll get it delivered as a pre-installed global power grid as opposed to ingots.

Just like when you go for a cup of coffee at a cafe and you only pay the commodity price of coffee beans, which at like $5 per kg and 20 grams of coffee per cup means a cup at starcucks is just 10cents. Right?