Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

Comment by darksaints | Hacker News Reader

I know someone who has gone fully off the grid via sailboat and is currently on his way around the world. He converted his sailboat to a hybrid setup (electric engines powered by the same batteries that power his stovetop, refrigerator, etc.). His power sources keeping those batteries charged are solar (1200W) and sail regeneration [0]. He has an 18kw diesel generator as a safety measure.

His story is particularly interesting to me because he doesn't give a shit about climate change. His views are best described by George Carlin [1]. And yet, he has the lowest carbon lifestyle of anybody I know. In the 15,000 nautical miles he's sailed, he has burned a grand total of 5 gallons of diesel. And that was only because he stayed for a few weeks in Palau without sailing around, and there was a stint of a few days where there was little solar energy due to storms. He now thinks his decision to buy a diesel backup generator was just a waste of money. If you ask him why he did it, these are his answers: It's cheaper, it's quieter, it's less smelly, and it's more reliable. Not a single mention of carbon emissions or resource depletion or pollution.

At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia. The costs and performance of renewables+batteries has come so far in the last 5-10 years, and I think we're finally at the point where the intrinsic costs will guarantee adoption.

[0] https://oceanvolt.com/solutions/hydro-generator/

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjmtSkl53h4

>At this point, I feel like the only reason fossil fuels are used anymore in new projects is inertia

Solar might work for boats and trains, but can it work for a plane? What about drones?

No renewable energy source can beat gasoline, sans nuclear power (which I think we should be transitioning to, along with the rest of the renewables). MIT built a gas powered drone that lasts 5 days (not minutes!) in the air[1] - that's simply impossible with today's battery tech. I know there are electric planes in development, maybe in production - but none of them match the passenger capacity or cargo volume of a Boeing 747. Until they do, there will always be a place for gas guzzling airliners.

Solar can work for households, skyscrapers, and apartments, and like you said, I think the advantages do outweigh the advantages of traditional coal plants so I'm excited to see that become more mainstream.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/mits-gas-powered-drone-is-...

You're right...I've got an availability bias that has limited my thinking. Any application where energy density is paramount will be dominated by fossil fuels for quite a while.

I'm curious to see what comes first: batteries that match the energy density of fossil fuels, or cost effective synthetic fuels created via renewable methods.

Perhaps this could be a good application for fuel cells?

One great one is machinery in factories. Faster recharge time, zero emissions.

If the incremental cost of renewable energy drops much more, the cheapest way to make gasoline will be using renewable energy to reduce CO2 with steam at the output of a not-yet-decommissioned coal plant.

You can make jet fuel from air, water and power, it's just hydrocarbons. If we had enough electricity from renewables we could just make all the fossil fuels we wanted.

How can you still think Nuclear is a good idea after reading that article? If a solar/battery farm is that cheap now, how cheap do you think it will be once you've spent 15 years building a nuclear power station that will either get flooded (rising sea for cooling) or have to be left turned off (fresh water no longer available)?

You might be interested in the sun seeker duo. It's in the ballpark for personal air travel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBA4XeMddMY

In flight charging (refueling) could be a possibility too.

The drone based solar planes can stay up longer than 5 days. I think the defense companies can keep them up for months.

That’s incredibly cool. I see they’re using an audio variometer to determine sink/updraft lift as well as using the solar-powered motor during cruise, and operate it as a glider during landing. Assuming they could fly it as a glider as well, although I don’t know how its low-speed performance is wrt. thermalling or stall characteristics.

Also cool, the adventure of circumnavigation on solar:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Impulse

Captured on this Nova special: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/the-impossible-flight/

Planes will be decarbonized later. We can start with the low hanging fruit, coal, peaker plants, and preventing new coal in growing nations. Batteries are improving every year, Teslas costs suggest they will have thr density in 10 or 15 years to displace the lower range flights. We could also utilize hybrid tech in planes, we can add a small amount of electric power just for takeoff and regen it during descent. But still, planes and certain industry will be decarbonized last.

That's really cool. I like seeing other off grid solutions.

I live in a bus with 1800W of solar. I still burn a lot of diesel driving around but very rarely have to run a generator or plug in for electric, even when I run my AC.

I love being off the electric grid. There's something so satisfying about using electric power and knowing it incurs no additional negative environmental cost. I never think twice about using power, assuming I have enough available.

When I finally buy some real estate I'd love to be off grid but still have fiber internet. I don't think that'll happen but I can dream.

Musks's satellite internet project (in progress) should perform very close to landline internet (unlike existing sats), with potentially even better latency.

Makes going off the grid even more enticing…

In some sense any technology is adopted or ignored based on its intrinsic merits or lack thereof. If we're about encouraging people to move to less-harmful technologies, making them genuinely better and irresistible seems like the avenue most likely to actually work. Making a quasi-moral issue out of it, unfortunately doesn't seem to work because we're not necessarily moral creatures, and what you get instead is a lot of sanctimony, insincere virtue signaling, hypocrisy, not to mention outright resistance. (Edit: Also see: "religions" LOL) Meanwhile an argument about the urgency of future self-preservation doesn't work either, because of that word "future" - we suck at looking ahead. Making & using tools, that's what we're good at. Evaluating tools based on what benefits they give me right now, that's what we're good at. Although we are good at disseminating, absorbing and believing in ideas too, so that's the bright spot in terms of some kind of widespread voluntary change. But on my more pessimistic days when I don't believe an abstract concept can change consciousness that much, I figure the transition to better technologies is going to have to be based on their own advantages - like your friend's electric powerplant on the boat.

Cool story, thanks for sharing that.

And? You think that an average person could do any of these?

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