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Comment by simonebrunozzi | Hacker News Reader

Nah. Sorry but I don't like it at all.

Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one.

But, let's make sure that the production, storage and distribution of energy, in all its forms, is sustainable, and available to every country.

The trend is already here: cheaper than ever solar and wind energy, cheaper and cheaper energy storage, new energy breakthroughs, promising ones like nuclear, etc.

It means the world will be able to soon produce much more energy, using only sustainable sources.

Let's make energy available to everyone, at an affordable rate. That's my dream. Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.

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Agreed 100%

Article from MIT regarding Solar energy: "The potential is enormous, says MIT physics professor Washington Taylor, who co-teaches a course on the physics of energy. A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use. And that energy is completely renewable — at least, for the lifetime of the sun. "It's finite, but we're talking billions of years," Taylor says. "

Totally agree. I think the premise of maintaining quality of life while dramatically reducing energy consumption won't bear out.

There is no successful path to stopping global warming that dramatically drives up energy cost or reduces quality of life. Plentiful zero carbon energy is the path forward.

2kW isn't starvation, it's abundance, luxury, and leisure for all. Especially if used efficiently (medium sized buildings, mass transit and low speed transport, power efficient durable applicances. We can have rich fulfilling lives on a fraction of that.

20kW is obscene needless waste, wholesale destruction of anything near a city or industrial area, exhaustion of every scarce resource and with the albedo increase and waste heat it entails will give us climate change just through sheer thermal output.

20 kW is a little more than the 25 hp engine of a VW beetle from the 1950's. (1 hp ~= 0.75 kW).

A PA system for a rock concert might be 20 kW.

And if everyone had a beetle engine running full power 24/7 we would have run out of oil decades ago and every urban or even suburban area would be uninhabitable.

A rock concert serves hundreds or thousands of people for a few tens of hours in a year. It adds milliwatts.

20kW each is 160TW. 20kW of work per person if prodiced in the area is enough to double the heat that a city like paris has to dissipate.

At 160TW from fission, world uranium reserves last a single year in a LWR or a few decades at full burnup (which basically no nuclear programs do). Thorium reserves would barely last longer.

At 160TW from PV we need 100 million tonnes of panels to be produced per year just for maintenance and to cover an absurd amount of land. Current tech would use all of the silver ten times over. Copper in the panels and wiring would use 5-100% of world reserves.

At 160TW direct thermal forcing is 1W/m^2 which isn't as catastrophic as 500ppm CO2, but is about the current GHG forcing (which is just going super swell). Take into account any realistic generation scenario (3W/W of heating from nuclear or 2W/W of albedo increase) and you're in a 2 or 3 degree heating scenario on top of our GHG problems. Add in a few billion more people and any 20kW future is apocalyptic.

20kW is obscene and if you think a lifestyle based on that level of wanton waste can be sustained without forcing many others in other places and other times to suffer you are deluded.

Couldn't have said it better. At a certain point--and I think some are past this point--it becomes a death cult of "any energy used is evil."

Agree 100%. We should be building mega-factories for solar cells, nuclear plants and pumping trillions of dollars into fusion research. Pivoting to renewable energy should be giving the same society wide focus that nation states gave to warfare and the production of weapons during ww2.

Nice fantasy. Note that building up that infrastructure at scale itself (within decades) overconstrains resources already.

> Let's have a 20,000-Watt society, not a 2,000-Watt one.

You know this really means “let’s keep the average per capita consumption high, so I can keep spending the 10x more than a third world citizen” right?

> Not a communist-like starvation of sorts.

Rational usage of resources is very far from “starvation”.

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