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Comment by ragebol | Hacker News Reader

Do you really think we can cover our far-future energy needs with renewables alone?

We have thousands of years of nuclear fission raw materials available, and we'll eventually have to turn to them despite what the anti-nuke people say.

We can but it means that you'll have solar captors (wind turbine, solar pv) littering the ground _or_ we'll just eat less energy. I'm afraid not many of us are ready for any of these two. Fusion would allow us to go on as usual. If only we had reliable information about the "is fusion for real use possible" question...

For a lot of places in the world you would need more storage than you need production units, especially further away you get from the equator and deserts. Fixing enough production from wind and solar is already well economical up to a point of 100% capacity with some countries already there, but with around 50% of actually energy consumption being from renewable.

We don't even need to litter the ground as ocean based wind farms are quite effective in using the wast amount of oceans we have. If however we are going to stop using fossil fuels we need to convert that energy into a storage medium like hydrogen, having massive pipelines to transport it, have large amount of storage facilities, and built equal amount of capacity of gas burning power plants as we have renewable capacity demands. The economics of that is the tricky bit.

withouthotair.com goes through this scenario of future being fully powered with renewables and it's just not possible.

China cannot meet it's energy demand increase even with building nuclear plants at a massive rate.

I was about to refer to McKay's stuff. Too bad he's gone...

Well, obviously. Because non renewables are not renewable, that is they run out.

Whatever our far-future energy use is going to be, it'll be from renewables alone because that is all there will be.

Renewables also run out.

If the sun stops shining (or turns into a red giant, which is on the schedule), we will have much bigger problems.

> Do you really think we can cover our far-future energy needs with renewables alone?

No, but they don't need to. Nearly all of today's technologies are incredibly wasteful as they are black box and produced within a system that seeks infinite growth.

Just look at the corporate-product produced e-waste [1], the corporate move against 'right-to-repair', and the relentless corporate walling off of the knowledge commons (scientific research) [2]. The effects of black box technologies on the education and knowledge commons are harrowing on their own.

Instead we can have an open source society that doesn't block people from learning, re-using and repairing the tech in our daily lives (and make it all modular). That means we won't use all the bloated technology we use today (goodbye archaic Intellectual Property system):

"The current political economy is based on a false idea of “immaterial scarcity.”

It believes that an exaggerated set of intellectual property monopolies – for copyrights, trademarks and patents – should restrain the sharing of scientific, social and economic innovations.3 Hence the system discourages human cooperation, excludes many people from benefiting from innovation and slows the collective learning of humanity. In an age of grave global challenges, the political economy keeps many practical alternatives sequestered behind private firewalls or unfunded if they cannot generate adequate profits." [3]

The way to get there is a better and more open quantification of the material flows/throughputs in society. The breakthroughs behind Valueflo.ws and Holo-REA (Holo-REA is a combination of http://valueflo.ws and http://holochain.org) make this possible. Together these projects enable a fully distributed Network Resource Planning software (in contrast to today's Enterprise Resource Planning systems/software that walls of the material accounting of planetary resources).

"The current political economy is based on a false idea of material abundance.

We call it pseudo-abundance. It is based on a commitment to permanent growth, the infinite accumulation of capital and debt-driven dynamics through compound interest. This is unsustainable, of course, because infinite growth is logically and physically impossible in any physically constrained, finite system." [4]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27152968 / https://torrentfreak.com/fbi-has-gained-access-to-sci-hub-fo...

[3], [4] http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/peer-peer-economy-and-ne...

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