> I think you mean transmission, not distribution, presumably because you don't know the difference.
Any and all problems from production source to consumption fall under the category of energy distribution. That includes long range transmission, storage, last mile and so on.
> This demonstrates how poor the humans are at reasoning about exponentials. In September 1918, the flu was still a tiny part of global mortality; not a single industrial country was anywhere close to having flu as their primary cause of death. By December it had killed several percent of the global population.
Environmentalist have predicting the raise of solar since 1970. Around 15-20 years ago they started arguing 'its actually cheaper' and 'exponential growth is coming'.
Maybe humans are bad at exponentials, but they are also bad at predicting when exponentials will happen.
And as far as I can tell growth of solar has not been on that aggressive of a curve. If you want to see exponential growth of energy policy go look at the first 20 years of nuclear.
> I would rather say that the fundamental failure of environmental policy is a failure to think through possibilities and consequences using knowledge and reason, instead acting based on gut feeling. Your comment betrays a similar lack of knowledge and reasoning. I suggest you level up your game before you lose all your money in a pyramid scheme.
The difference is that my ideas are actually proven in reality. You know the thing we live in. And it has been done with technology from the 70s. So its a simple fact that if the political will exists a massive nuclear build out can be achieved very quickly and historic data is also totally clear on the fact that nuclear plants, like basically everything else, get massively cheaper if built in high volume.
Carbon energy production had a solution and it had it for 50 years. As anybody knows, carbon that escapes earlier in time is more harmful. Countries like France have done a huge service to humanity by not polluting for the last 50 years.
And not admitting the complete and utter failure of environmental policy in light of this fact is just denial. If nuclear had been adopted on a large scale, we wouldn't even be having this discussion.
Your solution basically says 'well hopefully this 5-10 industries will be able to show exponential scales in the next 30 years' because only if that happens to you have even a small chance at actually reaching 2050 goals.
> 250 GW
> 400 billion dollars
If we want 250 GW of reliable power at the times we need them will require lot more then just panels.
For that same money we could just build the same basic nuclear plant over and over again, literally at the same location as current coal plants. Requiring almost no broader infrastructure change. A fraction of environmental disruption. A fraction of land use. A fraction of overall resource use. And I would be willing to be, less overall cost.
France build close to 50 GW in the 70s.