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Comment by polote | Hacker News Reader

> One important thing to notice is that uranium is a finite non-renewable resource.

One important thing to notice is that place on earth to put wind turbines and solar panels is limited. Now imagine that electricity needs greatly increased ...

At the end of the day, everything is finite

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We could provide for all the needs of our current power consumption by use of a single very large solar array in central africa or the middle east. The problem is no the availability of wind and solar- those can provide a monumental amount of energy. The problem is that energy and power are not the same thing. We need to be able to store energy widely throughout the grid and make massive transmission system improvements to facilitate the movement of energy from place to place.

Both of these are not fundamental problems, only financial / political ones. If we decided tomorrow that we really wanted these things we could have them.

Transmission and storage are not just political and financial problems, except in the sense that you can technically frame any problem as being them.

They are though - we know how to build high capacity transmission, we know how to build complex dispatch control systems, we know how to build energy storage. All we need is the money and factories and brains and hands to build a lot more of them. All that requires is powerful entities to decide it's important - i.e. politics.

Politics is not powerful entities. Do you mean politicians, or governments?

Either way this is a category error. Tesla needs those things and used venture capital. A correct thought would be: governments are one way to do this.

That place is much larger than you'll ever need at the very least in this century (maybe in a thousand years we'll be in trouble, but I imagine that in that era, we'll have completely different issues anyway).

Space is not at all an issue currently.

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