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Comment by Robotbeat | Hacker News Reader

> * More of the energy we use will come from the electric socket. And we aren’t ready.*

I don’t get this argument that increasing electricity generation is going to be particularly hard. From 1950 to 1959, the US more than doubled electricity generation.

The article says by 2050 we’ll need about double current electricity production. That’s three times as long! From 1950 to 1973, just 23 years, electricity production increased by over 450%.

People trying to make it sound like this will be unprecedentedly hard either forgot about the time when America used to grow electricity quickly, or they’re pessimistic about modern America’s ability to build anything big any more.

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> modern America’s ability to build anything big any more.

The first transcontinental railroad took 6 years to 1,900 miles. All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle. Black powder was used for the tunnels, but the holes to put the power in were bored by hand.

In contrast, Seattle Transit will take 30 years to build 22 miles of track, with modern construction equipment, and that's in the remote possibility they'll be on schedule.

Seattle used to have rail networks. The right-of-ways are still there, but Sound Transit very carefully avoids using them. Nobody is ever able to explain why. Some even still have rusting rail on them, while the ST crews are blasting new right of way a block over.

You should be aware of the death toll for the construction of the first transcontinental railroad. It's not something we can legally replicate.

Life was generally more dangerous and harder those days, and medical practice was terrible. Horses, for example, regularly killed people in those days (more than cars do), and their use is not the romantic image we have of them today.

If you can show that the railroad was built on blood, I'd be interested.

Exactly. It was a high dollar construction project. If anything it was safer than a mundane bottom dollar "cut whatever corners we need to be the lowest bidder" project. Everything was just that much more dangerous then.

Workers also flocked to those railway jobs, because they were better than their other options.

Most of the work was done by Chinese immigrants, who didn't have many other choices.

This combative assertion of race-based victimization is not as productive toward the conversation as people may think. Indeed, it tends to drive a great many people into defensive positions where they hunker down.

I grew up in Omaha, the end of the transcontinental railroad that Californians tend to forget about. I'm very sorry that so many Chinese immigrants died working on the railroad. I am also saddened by the many others who died, even though they were not immigrants of Chinese extraction. I'm also saddened by the atrocious conditions these immigrants escaped in China and compelled them to the US (I assume they did not desire to come to the US, and it's worth noting many no doubt landed elsewhere).

While the CRPP may have preferred Chinese labor, I do not find evidence that they did "most of the work". Indeed, the main employer of the Chinese was the CRPP, which laid 690 miles of the 1912 miles of track. The Union Pacific labor was primarily sourced from the remains of the Union and Confederate armies.

It is correct that 80% of the CRPP labor force was eventually (not initially) Chinese. It is also correct that the CRPP laid 36% of the rail by distance. First order approximation would suggest that the Chinese fraction of the built distance is between 15 and 29%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_transcontinental_railroa...

https://railroad.lindahall.org/essays/brief-history.html

> I assume they did not desire to come to the US

If you have evidence of Chinese slave ships coming to the US, I'd like to see it.

If I recall correctly, the Central Pacific had to resort to advertising for railroad labor in China to get sufficient labor force (so not merely able to recruit from recent immigrants, but having to induce immigration to get labor). The Union Pacific, for its part, relied heavily on Irish immigrants and ex-soldiers from the Union and Confederate armies.

That's hardly people flocking to the railway jobs.

Zero of them were forced into railroad work.

That's not the point, the point is people weren't flocking to these jobs as you claimed.

> The Central Pacific hired some Canadian and European civil engineers and surveyors with extensive experience building railroads, but it had a difficult time finding semi-skilled labor. Most Caucasians in California preferred to work in the mines or agriculture. The railroad experimented by hiring local emigrant Chinese as manual laborers, many of whom were escaping the poverty and terrors of the war in the Sze Yup districts in the Pearl River Delta of Guangdong province in China

It's like saying Bangladeshi workers flock to hard labour in Qatar because, sure because working in Bangladesh might be worse, not because the terrible conditions of working on infrastructure in Qatar as a Bangladeshi is some kind of standard for labour conditions or rights we should all aspire to.

> the point is people weren't flocking to these jobs as you claimed

Of course they were. Otherwise they simply couldn't have built it. They could not round people up, chain them together, and force march them to the construction site.

Sure, just like there's girls flocking to become prostitutes in parts of Thailand, and Bangladeshi to become construction workers in Qatar. Not because of desperation, no, out of free will in search for great jobs, they're not slaves you see... The way you completely miss this point and imply we should compare today's construction standards to that of the past and look at the past favourably due to all the potential efficiencies in taking shortcuts on labour conditions ("after all, desperate immigrant impoverished workers showed up freely, it must not be a problem) makes me glad you're not driving public policy today. I'm sure you're just as eager to give up your own comfy labour conditions for the sake of the project. I'm quite done arguing with someone who's not discussing in good faith.

Pretty normal accident rates are found worldwide for modern HSR construction that doesn't take two decades to build a single line like CA HSR. Look at what China or Spain can build in that time span for less money.

The build out of the Sound Transit light rail is taking 30 years for the following reasons:

1. ST only has the funds to build out a small % of the project at any one time. The work has to be staged because they can't take out all the $ at once.

2. Project managing the build out of the whole thing at once would require a much larger organization, which would be more expensive

3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.

4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.

The railroad wasn't built all at once, either. It was two teams, one going east, the other west. The companies were paid as work progressed, they did not have access to all the funds in advance. They didn't even know the route to be taken, they had survey crews working ahead of the construction, marking the best route.

If you don't think they had a much larger logistics problem, consider the problems with supplying the crews with food, water, clothing, rails, ties, horses, wagons, everything they need, from a thousand miles away.

The most important thing, though, was the companies were paid by the mile. The faster they built, the more money they made, because that would push the meeting point further away. They had ENORMOUS incentive to move fast. And it worked.

ST, however, has no incentive whatsoever to move things along. They have every incentive to delay, invent problems, all so they can go back and demand more money.

At a company I used to work for, they hired a team of old software engineers to write a piece of software for a good customer. It took them 3 months, and arrived on time and under budget. Want to know the secret? They had a huge bonus for being on time (I think it was ten grand apiece), which would shrink away for every day late.

I asked if that was what motivated them to be on time, and they all denied it with "we're professionals". I openly laughed at that.

It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)

> The urgency to create a vaccine for COVID‑19 led to compressed schedules that shortened the standard vaccine development timeline, in some cases combining clinical trial steps over months, a process typically conducted sequentially over years.

Over a year ago, I suggested this very process for vaccine development here, in HackerNews. This was strongly dismissed by people who told me I knew nothing about vaccine development (true) and that it couldn't be done (false).

I remember that.

At that time I was paying attention to people actually knew something about vaccine development. They said it would take at least 18 months. Being a practical pessimist I decided to take the under and say 12 months.

The guys that knew what they were talking about were mostly right, most vaccines making it are taking about 18 months to make it to distribution. But I bet that out of ~100 vaccine programs a couple of them beat that by six months.

> I remember that.

Thank you.

After the Northridge earthquake destroyed several bridges the contractors hired to perform the repairs earned millions in bonuses by finishing the job in just a few months. In one case they got an extra $150K bonus per day early. Financial incentives work.

Indeed they do. I find it amazing the amount of denial about this.

Saying incentives work is a pretty banal economic insight.

However, the primary reason Moderna and Pfizer they were able to get to market so fast was because the FDA agreed to a compressed testing schedule, Moderna’s preexisting investments in mRNA technology, and publicly funded research around stabilising spike proteins.

The primary contribution of Trump (and other world leaders) was the willingness to commit to purchasing large amounts of the vaccine and to accept much of the risk of the attempt failed. This accelerated the roll out as they were able to begin manufacturing before being given emergency approval.

However, it’s worth noting that many other successful vaccines were developed by charitable foundations and government research institutions in roughly the same period of time as the American efforts.

https://cen.acs.org/pharmaceuticals/vaccines/tiny-tweak-behi...

> Saying incentives work is a pretty banal economic insight.

It should be banal, but it isn't generally recognized by government planners, who expect that self-sacrifice and altruism governs peoples' behavior rather than selfishness.

Seattle is experiencing this as recent onerous regulations placed on landlords supposedly to protect renters is causing rents to rise and landlords to exit the business.

https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/editorials/stop-new-ren...

I feel like you didn't really respond to my point.

Anyway, people of course respond to incentives. However, that doesn't always means that the outcomes will be positive. There is such a thing as a perverse incentive, even in a free market utopia.

Perverse incentives in a free market are often the unintended result of regulation. For example, regulations to make it harder to fire people have the result of making employers pickier about who they hire.

The problem with you Murray Rothbard types is that you all too readily descend to panglossianism when evaluating market outcomes.

It's no great insight that markets are generally the most efficient means of allocating resources. However, it's also no secret that greedy individuals will gleefully extract economic rents from their monopoly over resources when they feel free to do so.

> It's amazing what happens when the incentives are aligned with the desired results. We saw that last year when vaccine developers wanted 18 months to develop a vaccine, and Trump gave them a big financial incentive to get it done before the end of the year. Later came the usual denials that these incentives motivated them in any way :-)

I agree with this point in general, and have some experience with government contracts, but think you’re over-simplifying a complex situation. The big thing which incentives got was zero holding back on capacity: I would say that was by far Trump’s best call in office because there’s no way to claw back that time later at any cost - the mRNA process is both highly specialized and new so there are bottlenecks all the way down. The other thing which saved time, however, was that testing time could be compressed because the disease was running rampant — that didn’t have much to do with incentives and couldn’t be predicted in advance. We also got lucky that the first vaccines were so effective: that was the primary concern with the first batch, that they might not be effective enough - instead, we had a Nobel-worthy unqualified success where the worst performing vaccines were at the warned level but the top candidates were some of the best vaccines ever made. That was welcome but we also got lucky.

I believe those are the reasons in the sense that they are result of [thing-we-can't-change] + [best-decision-under-the-circumstances]. But it's an example of the "a bunch of reasonable seeming decisions adding up to something preposterous" system that is quite common today.

Notably, if Seattle wanted a light rail could spend what it cost. Spending over thirty clearly has all sorts of problems - their supplies could go out of business in the middle of the process etc, etc.

I'm sure I find someone who could make the 3 billion dollars of planning money that went the California high speed rail sound sensible too.

>2. Project managing the build out of the whole thing at once would require a much larger organization, which would be more expensive

>3. Building the whole thing at once would require a much large workforce and much more equipment, which would be more expensive.

This doesn't work out in a linear model. You either hire N people for 2T years, or you hire 2N people for T years, either way a total cost of 2STN for a mean salary of S per year. It works the same way with project management. With equipment you might have something of a point, but not if the equipment is leased.

You can point to nonlinearity, but then that looks like a weakness of the system.

>4. Staging construction gives them the time to work out the details of the next phase while working on the current phase.

The city is a moving target; details you work out today may not be true tomorrow. Worse, the different pieces of the system are interdependent: changing conditions may invalidate work already done, incurring additional costs.

Ultimately, it seems like the only compelling reason on this list is (1), which itself points to a lack of overall strategy on the part of the government.

Which Seattle transit of 22 miles? The Line T took 3 years to construct, Line 1 is 22 miles but it's already built, it took 6 years of construction. Indeed it took longer to plan, but we're talking building in a major metropolitan area, not empty land.

> All the grading, track laying, and bridge construction was done by muscle.

It's both an argument to applaud efforts of the past, as well as criticise the nature of the past. I certainly wouldn't want to be a labourer in 1865, when life expectancy in the US was less than half (37) of today's 78 or so. It's not all labour standards of course, but it certainly must have played a role.

> empty land

Boring through two mountain ranges, crossing many rivers (including the Mississippi). Endless bridges for ravines, creeks, and rivers. Lots of snow sheds, the longest was 29 miles, using 29,000,000 board feet of lumber.

Done with muscle.

But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track, demanding endless environmental impact studies, attending every city council meeting to complain about the project, etc, etc.

Building a bridge across a ravine is a fairly well understood and easy to solve problem as long as no one is actively trying to stop you.

  But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track

Well, there were, but they were killed/displaced.

> But there were no neighborhood activists protesting every foot of track, demanding endless environmental impact studies, attending every city council meeting to complain about the project, etc, etc.

People love to get their pitchforks out against eminent domain but I assert without it not a single large public works project would ever get built. No dams, no sewer treatment plants, no water lines, no power lines, no power plants, no trains, no highways, no anything. Without eminent domain, there will always be some holdout somewhere that throws a wrench in things no matter how many truckloads of money you toss at them.

To actually build massive public infrastructure, you need a way to force people to cooperate. Without, you'd never get the project off the ground.

> Done with muscle.

And the lives of between 1,000 and 2,000 largely Chinese immigrants for the transcontinental railroad alone. Certainly more died during the construction of the remainder of the US rail network. Construction projects in other countries were significantly more deadly.

That wasn't due to speed, that was due to a lack of safety regulations. Spain and China built out national high speed rail networks in timely fashions in recent years with pretty normal accident rates for modern construction. French companies even offered faster and cheaper proposals for california HSR, and we said 'no' because they were French and not in some Bakersfield politican's donor list.

> Boring through two mountain ranges, crossing many rivers (including the Mississippi).

The First Transcontinental Railroad started from Omaha, Nebraska, so it crossed neither the Missouri nor the Mississippi. Indeed, it only crosses the North Platte River, not the main stem itself, and this is the river famously described as "too thick to drink, too thin to plow," i.e., not quite the same challenge as crossing the broader and much deeper Missouri, Mississippi, or Ohio rivers.

> Done with muscle.

Yes, Chinese muscle, many of whom died in the process. And I think we covered the 37 years of life expectancy during that time in the US, let alone for a Chinese immigrant doing heavy labour at a fraction of white people's salaries. I for one would not have preferred being born in 1865 to work on this railroad. But feel free to voluntarily give up all your privileges at your current job, it's definitely easier to get things done at the labour standards of 1860, using underpaid immigrant labour to do dangerous work. Let's all just give up our rights!

But my point was, the land was empty, i.e. not void of nature, but empty of people making political claims, e.g. like when building a transit line through Seattle. They're not remotely similar projects. The Seattle line of 22 miles you mentioned was built in the same 6 years, with need for far less 'muscle'.

At least empty of political claims if we forget about the de facto genocide of the native Americans that had to go at some point to make the US what it is today. I'm not sharing any nostalgia you may have of construction in this time.

> Chinese muscle, many of whom died in the process.

There were many thousands of others. The eastern team did not employ any Chinese.

> rights

Nobody gave up any rights to work on the railroad. None were conscripts or forced labor. Any could walk away anytime they pleased.

> They're not remotely similar projects.

Nothing resembling the project had ever been done before. Lots of people thought it was infeasible. It was a triumph, exceeding even the wildest expectations. It arguably was the lynch pin that created the modern America.

The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.

> Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.

"Railroad travel was dangerous in the early years. Train wrecks and derailments were common killing and injuring countless passengers and railroad men. Boilers blew up, bridges collapsed under the weight of trains, brittle iron tracks cracked, primitive breaks overheated and failed. The lack of a signal system sometimes caused two trains to be accidentally switched onto the same track and sent speeding into each other. The wood passenger car seemed almost to self-destruct on impact."

"Passengers could be crushed and thrown out. Windows would shatter because there was no safety plate glass in that day. Stoves would overturn spilling hot coals through the crushed and broken wood and instantly trains were set on fire. Cars would fall into rivers off of bridges."

"In the race to build the line there was naturally a long list of defects, unsafe bridges, tunnels too narrow, road bed not properly level. Poor rail alignment and carelessly laid cross ties. One government inspector declared it the worst railroad he had ever seen. But that didn't stop the railroaders."

"More than six times as many railroad men as passengers were killed or injured in accidents during the early days of the transcontinental railroad. Railroading ranked as one of America's most dangerous jobs."

"The technology was so dangerous that virtually every break man was maimed."

Source: The Railroads That Tamed The West, Modern Marvels Season 2 Episode 9. 1996.

https://search.alexanderstreet.com/preview/work/bibliographi...

Nothing like the 65,000 deaths from the Oregon Trail.

> Nobody gave up any rights to work on the railroad.

Because they didn't have any. Like the right for equal pay. The right to a safe working environment. The right to adequate breaks. The right to insurance etc. You think they had the same rights as you do today?

I'm not saying the project was a bad project, it was amazing. I'm saying that the speed of its development isn't something we can long for, without also mentioning it requires conditions which completely suck for its workforce in 1865, just to mention one thing.

> The railroad also saved lots of lives. Before the railroad, an estimated 65,000 people died on the Oregon Trail. After, they hopped on a train and arrived intact 3 days later.

That's great, I'm happy it was built. You're missing the point. I'm not criticising the project, for its time it was amazing. I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today. I'm not sure in what field of work you're in, but I'm sure if you give up half your salary, work twice as hard, take fewer breaks, give up your insurance and workplace safety, that the company could save money, hire more people, get things done faster. But while a project would get doen faster, actual society (i.e., the measure of your wellbeing, which is what much of life is about) would become worse.

For example, we can probably build things faster if we took into Bangladeshi labourers and paid them a fraction of our salaries, let them sleep in barracks, give them no health insurance, no workplace safety, see tons of them die. Indeed, it's how Qatar is building out its infrastructure massively at the moment, at breakneck speeds. But it's no example to me of how we should look to construct things today, nor is the transcontinental railroad an example for today, however amazing it was to build in the 1860s.

> Because they didn't have any.

There were no guards to prevent the workers from dropping their tools and leaving. That is a fundamental right.

> I'm criticising the fact that it shouldn't be held as a standard for construction today.

A 100 times increase in distance in 10% of the time with no powered construction equipment cannot be explained as merely paying people half as much and not giving medical insurance (though I'm sure they had medical teams on site to do what they could, but medical practice in those days was a bit frightening to us today). There was no intent to grind up workers blood to use as lubricant, and in fact they did many things along the way to reduce worker deaths and injuries. See my other comment about how they cut down on the use of nitro as it was too dangerous, despite being twice as fast as black powder.

It's quite interesting how you're completely unwilling to argue the original point (which is that a 1860s construction project is no model for today as it came at a great cost we're not willing to accept, besides being completely incomparable to the modern-day example you gave), but completely willing to argue quite meaningless aspects to the discussion seemingly for the sake of it.

It's mostly infant mortality, not labor standards. Average remaining years of life at age 10 has gone up, but nothing like as dramatically as the average life expectancy at birth has (expected age of death for a 10-year old white male: 58 in 1850, 76 in 2011).

yeah i'm sure we could have those breakneck speed railway construction in the middle of the open, unihabited plain for the majority of it and then for the incredibly dangerous stuff we could send in the marginalized at the time chinese/irish workers to handle unstable dynamite paid half that of other workers and ignoring any and all safety regulations and building codes of today.

They used black powder, dynamite only became available towards the end.

You have good points, but consider it ran TWO THOUSAND MILES, not 22, and still took only 10% of the time. You say "open plain", but try driving it some time. It had to go through two mountain ranges, for example.

The workers came because they got better pay than anywhere else. This includes the Chinese and Irish. It was not built by conscripts.

death toll is not known but it's over 1000 they estimate of just chinese laborers. at the peak there were 15,000 or so workers working on the rail. in fact the main suspected etymology of "chinaman's chance[0]" (aka no chance) was because they were the demographic that did the super dangerous work that killed 6% on the low end. The construction was also not one large project but two large projects constructed in parallel and the blasting/excavating was done ahead of the time. Sure they could lay down 10 miles of track a day on open plains but the hard work was through the mountains and that's the stuff that slows the construction down like if you were to build 22 miles of track in a heavily populated area with land already claimed by other entities and having to deal with easements and other legal battles + logistics.

Nitroglycerin was used in large quantities on the central pacific railroad construction and were predominantly chinese laborers whereas the union pacific was more irish laborers. The central pacific rail owned their own TNT factory even. I am not sure what you are getting at; black powder was used but it certainly wasn't the only thing in use especially in the west.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinaman%27s_chance

"At the tunnels, especially Summit Tunnel, the Chinese were using great amounts of black powder, up to five hundred kegs a day."

"The CP found that, when they got to drilling holes of fifteen to eighteen inches into the granite, poured in the liquid nitroglycerin, capped the hole with a plug, and fired it with a percussion cap, the nitroglycerin did a far better job than powder. The work progressed at nearly double the speed, and the granite was broken into far smaller pieces. But the accidents proved too much. In one, after a number of charges had been set off simultaneously, a Chinese worker hit a charge of nitro that hadn't exploded with his pick. It exploded and killed him and the others working near that spot. Strobridge declared, "Bury that stuff." Crocker said to get it out of there. And even though Nobel perfected dynamite in 1866, it was never tested or used by the CP. In 1867, the CP ignored the dangers and did make and use its own nitroglycerin, but except at Summit Tunnel did not make a practice of it."

"Nothing Like It In The World", Ambrose, pg. 200-201

I'm not just quoting the book, I read the whole thing. It's really a great story.

China managed to build a massive high speed rail network across rough terrain and completely inhabited land in a few years. Their network is safe and reliable.

I've noticed it's becoming increasingly common to just give up and excuse everything in the US. "Well we could build new rails, but..." "Well we could get health care prices under control, but..." "Well we could solve (x problem that most other countries don't have), but..."

It's kind of a sad decline from being the world leader by far like the US was 50 years ago. There's always a billion reasons to not do something, but not much push to actually do something.

Because they had a government mandate. ST continually must renegotiate with every level of local government. This could all be sidestepped by a state law, but this is just another cost of FPTP voting.

> Because they had a government mandate.

It wasn't quite that simple. It was a giant project, and there was the usual squirrel fire drill one sees with any large government project where everyone has their hand out for bribes and corruption.

In another display of modern government engineering, the I-5 / I-405 interchange in Lynnwood was under continuous construction for 20 years.

The 5 is a disaster of a freeway. It sees such an amazing amount of traffic and I feel like the state honestly has no idea what to do about it as it gets worse and worse each year with more commuters and increased trucking traffic, since freight rail is evidently at capacity in California. I have hit gridlock on that freeway at 10pm dozens and dozens of times. The entire way from LA to SD is marked by death, with scrape marks on every single barrier pretty much continuously over hundreds of miles, and tire marks of cars careening in a spin across all the lanes into a wall.

The solution is not to build more highways and roads, as much as many people hate to hear that. Basically as soon as it is made slightly easier and faster to drive, people will adjust by driving more.

There are quite a few instances where an already large interstate has been increased in size and the traffic got /worse/ after the fact. Cars just aren't an efficient way to move people around for the money they cost.

I'm genuinely curious if things are going to start swinging back in the other direction where there is more focus on other transportation modes outside of cars. There have been some small scale rail expansions in larger cities, some intercity rail lines opening (brightline) and being built (california high speed rail). It hasn't been enough to hit a sort of tipping point yet though.

While it is true that commute times might go down when freeways get wider, that's only half the coin. The purpose of the 5 is not to facilitate commuters like many other local highways in SD and LA, but to facilitate international trade between the U.S. and the world. Speed goes down, yes, but throughput goes up. Throughput is what is needed when you are trying to move trucking traffic from Central America through the southland north up the the central valley of CA, or east along the 10. It is what is needed when you need to move trucking traffic carrying all goods ordered by Americans from Asia from the port of long beach or LA into the heartland, because the freight rail grades are already at capacity. It's like having a bucket of water with a few holes vs a lot of holes; rate of flow might be unchanged per hole (lane), but you are moving more water (trucks) in the given span of time with the bucket with more holes. Right now there are dozens of supercarriers anchored off the coast of Long Beach, waiting weeks to unload goods into clogged logistical networks.

In a future where everyone takes a bus or a train or a bike to work, they are still ordering all their shit online from Asia and stocking their grocery stores with food from Central and South America, and there will therefore always be increasing demand for the movement of more goods over time as the population continues to grow.

People do things fast when they think it’s the most important thing, like the Covid vaccines.

Government officials and most of the contractors are going to keep on using their stupid inefficient 25mpg SUVs and pickup truck and never take the train anyway, why would they want the project to go any faster?

It's important to remember that electricity isn't an energy source, it's an energy medium. This seems trivial, but seems to be a blind spot for people who, for instance, try to set up comparison between electricity and fossil fuels. The comparison doesn't make sense when one is an energy source and the other merely a medium.

Generating electricity is a bit of a misnomer, because it's more about repackaging energy than creating it. Again, this is trivial but easy to lose sight of. The important question is: what's the energy source?

Install solar on everyone's roofs. Subsidize it with money from property taxes. Make it mandatory for owners of rented buildings, and mandatory for businesses. That alone will easily meet all our projected energy requirements for quite a while.

As of Jan 1, 2020 California has come very close to these requirements. Most new construction residences (with a few exceptions) must have enough solar generation equipment to meet 100% of the buildings electrical needs.

lol no it won't. This is a horrible oversimplification. Solar panels can only offset some energy requirements for a limited time in certain climates. Even if you were to install batteries in every home, the cost is monumental, battery supply is limited and you lose the economy of scale.

If they had controlled COVID early enough the economic losses could have quite possibly allowed for everyone to have solar already.

It’s the future actually.

https://www.tesla.com/en_au/support/energy/savpp-faqs (South Australia Virtual Power Plant FAQs)

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/teslas-australian-virtual-p... (Tesla's Australian virtual power plant propped up grid during coal outage)

> Once complete, the VPP will include 50,000 houses fitted with 5 kW rooftop solar systems and 13.5 kWh Tesla batteries. Together, they will be capable of delivering up to 250 MW of solar power and 650 MWh of energy storage.

> So far, less than 1,000 homes have been completed. Still, the aggregated storage was able to make a difference.

With regards to Australian rooftop solar potential, it’s estimated at almost 179GW, roughly a bit more than 3.5x total current Australian generation capacity.

What’s the ratio on a GWhr/year basis? 3.5x the peak power seems like it could easily be less on a total energy basis.

Looking here, it seems like 1 GWp in Australia can yield around 1500GWh/year. A conventional plant running just 20 hours per day yields 7300 Wh/Wp/yr.

https://www.solarchoice.net.au/blog/how-much-energy-will-my-...

I don't think the person you are replying to had a good plan, but solar definitely could offset the energy consumed by cars. The average car will only consume ~12KWh per day. Even a small 3-4KW system can do that.

Yes, its an oversimplification, but in a world where the problem is all the electric cars, you also have rolling battery buffers available whenever you want them.

We already use hot water heaters and air conditioners in a similar way. Peak shaving with people's home charging setups wouldn't be hard to add.

In normal times, my electric car is almost never at home when the sun is shining on my solar panels.

So you feed the power to the grid and the grid charges your car at work.

I think the problem is that much energy policy originates from california, which has a relatively mild climate.

Additionally in california, peak energy demand seems to be when the sun is very strong in the summer, so solar power matches very well with air conditioning load.

The rest of the united states has weather, so situations like the-dead-of-winter + no-sunshine might be a better fit for fossil fuels.

Will it? Certainly in my part of the country most structures cannot go off-grid on solar alone, even with significant storage. Hard to make it up on volume.

Then we have a huge surplus of energy during the day and a huge deficit at night. What then?

Send it back into the grid. Charge cars. Feed industries that need daytime power. Pay the owners back for it, or give them free night-time electricity in returns. Heat up some high heat capacity goo, or hell even water, and use that to heat your apartment during cold nights in desert weather.

If you still have surplus after all that, mine bitcoin and use it to fund battery research, environmental initiatives, fund education, fund healthcare.

Surpluses are never a problem.

Free night-time electricity from where? You need to generate it from somewhere or store it. It just doesn't magically appear...

Solar in large scale will be fun. Essentially at peak production it will have zero price or potentially negative price... And then during night you need to generate it from somewhere and pay premium... I wonder would it be actually cheaper soon not to have solar and just get it for free during day and then pay same during dark times...

How much energy do you think would be required to air source sequester all of carbon we’ve emitted into the atmosphere over the last 100 years? I don’t believe we have any shortage of demand for electricity, and loads will be structured to accommodate variable generation (this is typically referred to as demand response).

Wind, especially if you're in the Great Plains or connected by HVDC transmission lines to the Great Plains.

https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/325

https://www.volts.wtf/p/transmission-fortnight-burying-power

"If you still have surplus after all that, mine bitcoin and use it to fund"

Or maybe use it to power factories that make hundred dollar bills?

Sorry, but Bitcoin does not create a net increase in value for all the energy dumped into it. As you described it, it is simply an elaborate way to waste resources.

Don't mine Bitcoin then, run GPU farms and rent them out to AI researchers.

Point is, surplus isn't really an issue.

This is basically a pipe dream unless people radically change the way they consume power.

Peak energy consumption is typically around dusk, so driven primarily by home consumption not industry. Convince people not to use air conditioners after 4pm and maybe we would be able to match supply to demand.

Moreover, even if we all started sitting in our hot dark houses after work we'd still have an extremely variable supply which would mean more robust infrastructure to transmit less overall power.

Hence solar, which generates until sunset, paired with ~4 hours of storage, which carries the grid through peak evening load until most folks are off to bed and grid load declines rapidly.

https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/confronting-duck-curve-... (https://www.energy.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_artic... for this illustrated; batteries replace the natural gas ramp)

https://youtu.be/P_d0x8uG6kE

And then it's a rainy day and everybody stays home from work because there's no power? Or we spin up a bunch of dirty natural gas?

This also doesn't address the seasonal changes in supply. We're realistically talking about creating energy infrastructure (and then maintaining it) that ulaverages maybe 20% capacity.

I just feel like solar proponents like to completely ignore the very real unsolved issues because solar+batteries is tidy if you don't think too much about it.

Natural gas fired peaker plants will continue to be a crucial part of our electrical system indefinitely. They allow generation to be rapidly spun up and down to stabilize the grid; other generation sources can't react as quickly, or sometimes can't react at all. And natural gas isn't very dirty.

Lower the price of electricity when there is a surplus, and people and industry will figure out a way to use it, including charging batteries.

This is really the natural solution - economic forces do figure things out.

I do wonder about situations like the recent texas fiasco. Maybe we want something like "cheaper at night" not pure economic nonsense like "$9,000/kwh for the next 15 minutes"

> Make it mandatory for owners of rented buildings, and mandatory for businesses.

So my grandmother, who gets a large part of her retirement income from a couple of $5-600/mo rental homes she owns will have to shell out 10-20k each to keep doing that? On what planet does that make sense?

Subsidize it 100% for her and low income rental owners then.

For the high income armchair landlords, impose a solar tax and fund solar installations for everyone else.

I want to think about how to make stuff possible, not excuses about why we can't do it. This kind of excuse-making attitude is why the US is falling behind in climate efforts.

Shouldn't need to subsidize it. The idea is that your $x PV install will generate enough income to make it a worthwhile investment.

If that’s the case, the mandate is equally unnecessary.

It obviously is. People will install solar panels in bad locations (for solar) because of the mandate.

Is that outcome a good thing in some way that I’m not seeing? Because to me, that just seems wasteful. (For society I mean; it’s obvious how it’s a good thing for makers and installers of PV systems.)

they have to use the whole climate change narrative as a reason to push renewables, because it doesn't make economic sense.

Well yes, because scientifically speaking we're fucked if we don't do something, and the current iteration of the economy incentivizes short-sighted thinking, not long-term survival and avoidance of unrest due to a resource crisis.

It makes economic sense. Damage caused by CO2 pollution doesn't make economic sense.

The anti climate change narrative also fuels macroeconomic problems as the willingness for the US to invest into its own nation decreases for no logical reason or gain.

There is nothing virtuous about being dependent on fossil fuel imports.

> or they’re pessimistic about modern America’s ability to build anything big any more.

This wouldn't be an entirely unfounded concern.

Yeah, I was throwing the author a bone, there. Unfortunately, with scare articles like this, it’s somewhat of a self fulfilling prophecy. We need articles talking about how it’s relatively easy given historical capabilities, but we need actual action.

True that. Setting expectations and believing something is possible is an underrated part of the process to get there.

Pessimism leads to inaction.

Too bad the nature of politics has changed. We need another FDR and WPA. Too many politicans favor crafting lucrative public contracts to their cabal of friends than crafting a productive public works project. There is no job security in that.

Another big issue is the cost to run. In order to be a decent candidate, you need to buy national advertising, which is owned by a handful of companies, which would prefer certain candidates who would provide them with profitable legislation.

The current crop is rotten and the mechanisms we have to get a new one are coopted by these entrenched private interest groups who actively fight to ensure their profitable status quo doesn't change, and only does if a profitable angle has been already conceived. Maybe this is the American Way.

I disagree. The FDR era featured a lot more public corruption and cronyism then currently exists. Indeed, I suspect there's some trade-off between anti-corruption and the ability to get things built, as layers of checks, hearings, certifications, etc. end up making it much harder and more time consuming to build anything.

The FDR era featured a lot more public corruption and cronyism then [sic] currently exists.

This is a bizarre misrepresentation of history. There are entire industries of corruption now that didn't even exist in FDR's time. The current government spends far more as a percentage of (a vastly larger) GDP; the fact that nothing useful gets done can't very well argue for less corruption.

Generating electrical energy isn't difficult. Distributing it is. Balancing variable generation against variable demand is even more difficult.

What you've forgotten here is that doubling or tripling the carrying capacity of electrical infrastructure isn't a trivial task. Remember that in the 50s, electrical energy was generated at large sites like the Hoover dam or the James Bay project in Quebec. It was then distributed out to houses that didn't have many high capacity electrical appliances.

Today, all that has changed with dishwashers, electric dryers and now EVs slowly becoming standard. You are making it seem like these infrastructure upgrades can be magicked into existence without decades of investment, planning and effort.

The article is right - no country is ready for the sudden change. Watch as EVs go from a rich person's toy to the mainstream and the electrical infrastructure keeps collapsing dealing with the sustained surge in demand.

Infrastructure is sized for peak power usage, so for those early evening times when somebody might have their air conditioner, range and clothes dryer running simultaneously.

Electrification will significantly increase energy usage (kWh), but it has a much smaller impact on peak power (kW). Electric cars charge at night, electric heat pumps replace air conditioners, et cetera.

Also, infrastructure was designed for rising demand. For infrastructure was built in the 60s the planners would say "demand is doubling every decade, so if we want our infrastructure to last 100 years..."

Sure, there will be some places that don't have adequate infrastructure, but it will be a small fraction.

And just like the internet, the 'generation' is getting closer and closer to the customer. As netflix installs appliances in my region, we're also generating electricity at the rooftop or regional cogen systems.

That parked electric car may very well back-feed into the grid to shave the peaks of demand.

That clothes dryer might run 'slow' until it's peak pricing time, same with EV charging.

My 'smart' thermostat already does it for HVAC. Everything else will too.

I don't think you have a good handle on how the distribution system is sized. Single, large loads like EVs at 10-30 kW were on nobody's radar even as recently as the 2010s. yes, infrastructure was designed for rising demand but not the sudden addition of 7 kW+ of capacity in multiple homes.

A typical EV charger draws anywhere from 7 kW to 25 kW. That is the total connected load of more than one typical North American house. And typical pole-mounted transformers are around 50 -200 kVA. Two EVs added to the regular mix is all it takes to upset the balance.

An AC unit uses 3.5 kW and there are times everybody on the block is using them. The grid doesn't fall over.

Also, where the heck do you find 25 kW home chargers? I've heard of 60A ones (13.2 kW), but ours is 7.2kW and is probably about twice as much as we need.

The grid in California falls over when everyone turns on the AC. Rolling blackouts are still a problem. Our state government and the electric utilities (especially PG&E) have terribly mismanaged the system through a mix of greed, incompetence, and caving in to special interests.

I think the tesla ones can do ~20 kw:

https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/wall-connecto...

Early tesla vehicles could actually charge from two home chargers simultaneously (though I'm uncertain how many amps total).

and of course, there are homes with more than one car.

Starting in the early 90s, here in Ireland, instant heating electric showers, generally about 10kW, became very popular (they’re actually beginning to die out; many new homes have PV as part of meeting govt energy efficiency targets, so get tanked hot water ‘for free’). And 90s Ireland wasn’t winning any prizes for electrical infrastructure. I’m sure the US can manage some car chargers.

> What you've forgotten here is that doubling or tripling the carrying capacity of electrical infrastructure isn't a trivial task.

This has been studied recently, and the supposedly numbers aren't crazy:

> The increase in transmission needs as renewable electricity supply grows, for all 80%-by-2050 renewable electricity scenarios, result in an average annual projected transmission and interconnection investment that is within the recent historical range for total investor-owned utility transmission expenditures in the United States (i.e., $2 billion/yr to $9 billion/yr from 1995 through 2008) (Pfeifenberger et al. 2009).

> New transmission in the high renewable electricity scenarios was found to be concentrated in the middle and southwestern regions of the United States, mainly to access the high-quality wind and solar resources in those regions and to deliver generation from those resources to load centers.

* https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/52409-ES.pdf

* https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html

See "Volume 4: Bulk Electric Power Systems: Operations and Transmission Planning":

* https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/52409-4.pdf

December 2020 study from Princeton, "Net-Zero America" by 2050:

* https://www.princeton.edu/news/2020/12/15/big-affordable-eff...

* https://environmenthalfcentury.princeton.edu/

There are cost estimates for various scenarios: some or zero natgas, some or zero nuclear, mostly or all renewable.

Summary news report of the study:

* https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/15/race-to-zero...

The NREL report and most of what you posted focuses on transmission.

What i'm referring to is the expansion capacity of distribution grids to suddenly accommodate large amounts of power from EVs.

Simply posting a lot of links isn't usually a good strategy.

Pure unsubstantiated FUD.

The national grid in the UK has done tons of preparation - read about their Dynamic Containment program for example - but it’s much easier to just wave your hands and claim “we aren’t ready, it’s too hard”.

This is such a typical FUD article from the climate change denying WSJ. Boring and predictable

Generating electrical energy isn't difficult.

That's good; it should be generated where it's needed and then distribution will be unnecessary.

After all, it's not even that hard or costly in comparison.

Total expected lifetime cost of the F-35 program [1]: 1.5T$

Expected cost of shifting the US to 100% renewables [2]: 4.5T$ (note these estimates are probably at least double that of the real costs in light of the rapidly dropping deployment costs since)

Environmental cost of not doing it: Projected at 1.5T$ for the US by 2050, so it's almost self financing.

This is not even about serious economic restraint, it's literally just about having a frickin' fighter or not.

Note the Apollo program was a bargain compared to both at just 280B$...

"We choose to go to the Moon...We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too."

[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/f35-fighter-jet-pe... [2] https://e360.yale.edu/digest/shifting-u-s-to-100-percent-ren...

You need to build 300 square miles of wind farms or two nuke plants every three days to get to net zero by 2050. Won't happen. There's a forbes article that breaks it all down.

Well, we will need to increase electricity generation while at the same time replacing existing fossil fuel generation. So that adds to the challenge.

Not saying this is impossible, but it surely is a challenge.

40% of our electricity is clean. So even if we need to more that double electricity while making all the existing electricity clean, the growth rate is still only a factor of 5 over 29 years compared to the factor of 5.5 we grew from 1950 to 1973.

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