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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of funny, really: through human history, we "gained" a lot of "free" energy by burning fossil fuels; now, to fully recover our atmosphere from the externalities of that energy generation, we would have to expend just as much, if not more, than that total amount of energy we ever "gained", to essentially un-burn those same fossil fuels.

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> we would have to expend just as much, if not more, than that total amount of energy we ever "gained", to essentially un-burn those same fossil fuels.

Ironically enough, our renewable electrification process is like a turbo coming up to speed. There is simply so much energy hitting the Earth from the Sun (if I recall off hand, about an hour of sunlight can power humanity for a year, or thereabouts) that if we continue to rapidly deploy solar and wind, we'll have orders of magnitude more energy than humanity currently requires for a first world lifestyle while also having enough energy to sequestor all of the original carbon burned through fossil fuel based industrialization.

"A long way around the block" if you will.

https://www.iea.org/publications/renewables2017/

https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable...

I pray this is the case. I dream of a world where energy is so cheap we could bury our roads in tunnels underground, freeing the surface from their blight.

Don’t dream, find opportunities to contribute.

I myself am working on transitioning out of security engineering into renewable energy/utility storage deployment.

This is something I’m interested as well. How are you making the transition?

Reading as much as possible on construction and project management, electrical transmission design & regulations, and plain ol’ cold calling everyone in the industry who will return my voicemails (“will work for experience”). Also volunteering whenever possible to lend a hand for solar and wind generation installs.

It goes without saying, if you’re in the industry and hiring, I’m interested! (Wink wink nudge nudge Tesla Puerto Rico)

Doesn't this feel like we are shifting the problem somewhere else? I'm not sure it is a sustainable option.

Solar panels take huge amounts of energy to produce, which may not be recovered in the life of the panel.

Its only sustainable if it's possible to have a solar panel factory powered by solar panels... Which seems unlikely

The idea that solar panels take more energy to produce than they are able to output would make solar panels economically unviable as the energy cost must be recovered to at least break even. That may have been true several decades ago but the solar panels of today are competing economically just fine.

But deployment is slowing in jurisdictions that have decided they can't afford the subsidies and what it does to power prices.

Solar and wind are cheaper than coal without subsidies.

Is there any data on this? It takes huge furnaces running at thousands of degrees to melt and process the silicon for the panels, not to mention all the electronics needed to be manufactured. I just can't see how a panel can recover that amount of energy, but maybe I should go and crunch the numbers

there are two ROI points, one ecological/energy wise and the other economical. the former has been roundabout 1.5 years of production a decade ago. I assume this has gotten better through more efficient production. the latter depends very much on the price of electricity. but since the kWh production price for photovoltaics recently fell below that of coal shows that solar totally makes sense.

Meanwhile the US is announcing billions of dollars to prop up coal plants

"[The sun] blasts unimaginable quantities of energy into space each instant, and virtually every joule of it is wasted entirely. Incomprehensible riches can be ours if we can but stretch our arms wide enough to dip from this eternal river of wealth."

- Nwabudike Morgan

Giant mirrors in space, redirecting energy to the surface of the earth...

Be more ambitious: the solar wind is already electricity. Engineer vast magnetic funnels to direct it into storage batteries (or just position your storage at the north/south magnetic poles and let Earth's natural field do (part of) the job).

Indeed. It's like we've been accruing technical debt for centuries by taking the "easy way out" until our technology was developed enough, and now need to pay it all back, with interest.

But does the interest rate of this debt exceed the economic gains we've made from fossil fuels? (Also, did you just use technical debt as a metaphor for regular old debt?)

Well, that depends; like most loans, if you don’t pay it back in a timely fashion, bad things happen... and we don’t really have a bankruptcy procedure.

It doesn’t really matter, because we’ve already done it and we won’t be doing it again.

So far the interest rate has been delightfully low. But the rate is adjustable and the bank has been making noises about massively hiking it. Let’s hope we can pay off the loan before the payments exceed our means.

I think that will largely depend on how we define the ROI.

> Also, did you just use technical debt as a metaphor for regular old debt?

Hahahaha, good catch. I just might have.

It makes all the energy we used basically a loan.

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