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Comment by aidenn0 | Hacker News Reader

One comment on your sustainability argument, now that I know you are the author:

Calculating "years of energy" based off of current usage seems silly to me given that global energy usage has been rising exponentially for centuries.

For example, if you assume a 3% per-year increase in global energy usage, 12 billion years becomes a bit less than 1000 years.

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Meanwhile California has increased population and kept their energy production relatively stable. We may have reached a peak.

California's power grid is not in great shape.

With the increase in EVs, AC, and heat pumps, I'd expect electricity demand to increase in the next decade.

Electricity demand will surely increase. Primary power demand on the other hand will most likely go down. An EV is about 80% efficient from solar panel to movement, an ICE is only about 30% efficient from gas to movement (and you have to invest a whole bunch of energy to get gas into tank starting from oil underground). Similarly, heating with a heat pump is about three times more energy efficient than heating with oil or gas.

Today we use about 600 exajoules of primary energy per year. The sun hits us with about 3.8 million exajoules per year. 1.03^1000 is a factor of 7e12. So under that assumption, the earth would be making 1 billion times more power than we receive from the sun.

I can pretty much guarantee that we won't be scaling at 3%/yr for the next 1000 years. And if we do, that's an argument for lots more nuclear fission, and a lot of fusion too. Because the solar-derived flows (wind, solar, hydro, biofuel, fossil fuel) won't be able to keep up even if we covered 100% of the earth with solar panels!

Earth? Who said any of that will be used on Earth? OK, Earth will use a bit of it.

We will need to dismantle gas giants' moons for construction materials.

Yes, every exponential curve is really a logistic curve in disguise, but using today's energy is picking an arbitrary point along that curve.

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