Okay, this has been driving me bonkers for years now. I keep encountering blatantly contradictory claims about what is “obviously” true about the territory. taw, you said:
Renewable energy available annually is many orders of magnitude greater than all fossil fuels we’re using[...]
And you might well be right. But the people involved in transition towns insist quite the opposite: I’ve been explicitly told, for one example, that it would take the equivalent of building five Three Gorges Dams every year for the next 50 years to keep up with the energy requirements provided by fossil fuels. By my reading, these two facts cannot both be correct. One of them says that civilization can rebuild just fine if we run out of fossil fuels, and the other says that we may well hit something dangerously close to a whimper.
I’m not asking for a historical analysis here about whether we needed fossil fuels to get to where we are. I’d like clarification on a fact about the territory: is it the case that renewable forms of energy can replace fossil fuels without modern civilization having to power down? I’m asking this as an engineering question, not a political one.
Can you pretty, pretty please tell me where this graph gets its information from? I’ve seen similar graphs that basically permute the cubes’ labels. It would also be wonderful to unpack what they mean by “solar” since the raw amount of sunlight power hitting the Earth’s surface is a very different amount than the energy we can actually harness as an engineering feat over the next, say, five years (due to materials needed to build solar panels, efficiency of solar panels, etc.).
And just to reiterate, I’m really not arguing here. I’m honestly confused. I look at things like this video and books like this one and am left scratching my head. Someone is deluded. And if I guess wrong I could end up wasting a lot of resources and time on projects that are doomed to total irrelevance from the start. So, having some good, solid Bayesian entanglement would be absolutely wonderful right about now!
The diagram comes from Wikipedia (tineye says this) but it seems they recently started merging and reshuffling content in all energy-related articles, so I can no longer find it there.
That’s total energy available of course, not any 5 year projection.
Solar is probably easiest to estimate by high school physics. Here’s Wikipedia’s.
Do you happen to know anything about the claim that we’re running out of the supplies we need to build solar panels needed to tap into all that wonderful sunlight?
Solar panel prices are on long term downward trend, but in the short term they were very far from smooth over the last few years, having very rapid increases and decreases as demand and production capacity mismatched both ways.
This issue isn’t specific to solar panels, all commodities from oil to metals to food to RAM chips had massive price swings over the last few years.
There’s no long term problem since we can make solar panels from just about anything—materials like silicon are available in essentially infinite quantities (manufacturing capacity is the issue, not raw materials), and for thin film you need small amounts of materials.
Usual crap likely originating from pro-nuclear activists. The nuclear is the only green energy source which can run out of essential material (zirconium) for real and couldn’t easily substitute anything for zirconium. edit: note. I do see nuclear power as in principle green, but I also seen a plenty of pro nuclear articles which diss all other green energy sources on bs grounds and promote misconceptions.
The solar panels use silicon and very very tiny amounts of anything else. The silicon is everywhere.
There’s similar claim that the wind turbine construction would run out of neodymium (which is used in magnets), never mind that neodymium magnets are not essential and are only used because its relatively cheap, and increases efficiency by couple percent while cutting down on amount of necessary copper and iron. I.e. run out of neodymium, no big deal, the price of wind energy will rise a few percent.
Okay, this has been driving me bonkers for years now. I keep encountering blatantly contradictory claims about what is “obviously” true about the territory. taw, you said:
And you might well be right. But the people involved in transition towns insist quite the opposite: I’ve been explicitly told, for one example, that it would take the equivalent of building five Three Gorges Dams every year for the next 50 years to keep up with the energy requirements provided by fossil fuels. By my reading, these two facts cannot both be correct. One of them says that civilization can rebuild just fine if we run out of fossil fuels, and the other says that we may well hit something dangerously close to a whimper.
I’m not asking for a historical analysis here about whether we needed fossil fuels to get to where we are. I’d like clarification on a fact about the territory: is it the case that renewable forms of energy can replace fossil fuels without modern civilization having to power down? I’m asking this as an engineering question, not a political one.
They are incorrect. Here’s a helpful diagram of available energy.
Can you pretty, pretty please tell me where this graph gets its information from? I’ve seen similar graphs that basically permute the cubes’ labels. It would also be wonderful to unpack what they mean by “solar” since the raw amount of sunlight power hitting the Earth’s surface is a very different amount than the energy we can actually harness as an engineering feat over the next, say, five years (due to materials needed to build solar panels, efficiency of solar panels, etc.).
And just to reiterate, I’m really not arguing here. I’m honestly confused. I look at things like this video and books like this one and am left scratching my head. Someone is deluded. And if I guess wrong I could end up wasting a lot of resources and time on projects that are doomed to total irrelevance from the start. So, having some good, solid Bayesian entanglement would be absolutely wonderful right about now!
The diagram comes from Wikipedia (tineye says this) but it seems they recently started merging and reshuffling content in all energy-related articles, so I can no longer find it there.
That’s total energy available of course, not any 5 year projection.
Solar is probably easiest to estimate by high school physics. Here’s Wikipedia’s.
Here are some wind power estimates. This depends quite significantly on our technology (see this for possible next step beyond current technology)
World energy consumption is here
Thank you!
Do you happen to know anything about the claim that we’re running out of the supplies we need to build solar panels needed to tap into all that wonderful sunlight?
Solar panel prices are on long term downward trend, but in the short term they were very far from smooth over the last few years, having very rapid increases and decreases as demand and production capacity mismatched both ways.
This issue isn’t specific to solar panels, all commodities from oil to metals to food to RAM chips had massive price swings over the last few years.
There’s no long term problem since we can make solar panels from just about anything—materials like silicon are available in essentially infinite quantities (manufacturing capacity is the issue, not raw materials), and for thin film you need small amounts of materials.
Usual crap likely originating from pro-nuclear activists. The nuclear is the only green energy source which can run out of essential material (zirconium) for real and couldn’t easily substitute anything for zirconium. edit: note. I do see nuclear power as in principle green, but I also seen a plenty of pro nuclear articles which diss all other green energy sources on bs grounds and promote misconceptions.
The solar panels use silicon and very very tiny amounts of anything else. The silicon is everywhere.
There’s similar claim that the wind turbine construction would run out of neodymium (which is used in magnets), never mind that neodymium magnets are not essential and are only used because its relatively cheap, and increases efficiency by couple percent while cutting down on amount of necessary copper and iron. I.e. run out of neodymium, no big deal, the price of wind energy will rise a few percent.