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Comment by xbmcuser | Hacker News Reader

This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially energy free which will decrease carbon production as well as allow to use the energy to capture carbon. Maybe we can get some nuclear fission or fusion breakthrough in the future but adding solar, wind and batteries as fast as possible should be the main focus for now.

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So far we are still increasing the rate at which we extract fossil fuels, even with all the investment in renewables and alternate power sources in the last decades (https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels). The Jevon paradox seem to still be valid in this, even with a few countries that managed to have most of their energy matrix on clean sources.

And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not enough to just extract a bit less, thing that still may take years to be achieved, all that was managed to be captured by some expensive carbon capture technology is probably orders below of how much we increased emissions. Absolute global numbers matters here.

And yes, it is not possible to just stop extracting fossil fuels and try to solve our energy needs with what we have built so far. But time is running out (if it is not over already). Severe drop in consumption should be in the map too, there was a shortlived dent in the trends around 2020.

And that’s why carbon taxes are so beneficial. It’s a shame they’ve been villainized and are unpopular.

The issue is that they do not work. If your constituents made bad investments and are stuck with oil heating because they heard that solar is woke on Fox, you cannot actually have them face the consequences of their actions. You will either not be elected or the media response will be so bad that you won't be able to govern. You will have to bail them out or add exemptions

This is easily solved. Particularly as industry is such a large contributor to GHG emissions, imposing a carbon tax on industry and possibly even allowing grandfathering allows the costs to be baked in to (only) future considerations, and makes cleaner companies more competitive compared to dirtier ones.

Baking them into future decisions will not be enough. Sorry, if people made bad investments it will teach them to be smarter. Accomodations can only go so far to be effective.

I am a fan of a carbon tax, but one issue I’ve never seen addressed by proponents is the regressive structure of the tax. Oftentimes the poorest areas are using the most carbon-intensive energy sources and thus stand to be hurt the most by a carbon tax. There is little the average poor person can do to avoid this Similar logic applies for, e.g. EV subsidies - the people most capable of dishing out the cash to secure a subsidy are those in the financially best positions.

Within a given area rich people tend to use more carbon. Poor people are less likely to be taking international flights, etc.

Annoyingly, one big problem is that we've allowed NIMBY's to make it illegal to build homes near jobs, so people who can't afford homes near work are often stuck driving long distances to work through no fault of their own.

Rich people can afford electric cars while poor people won’t be able to, even if the car is used, through the next decade. If anything, SUV prices will drop like a rock…

Also, rich people can decide to pay for expensive upgrades to their homes (switching to heatpumps, upgrading electrical wiring for efficient solar/wind usage, solar panels, high voltage chargers for electrical vehicles), while poorer home owners (many of whom are on fixed income), aren’t able to do those things.

We agree, this is why I am not a huge fan of subsidies for EV's. Among other things, we should be encouraging fewer cars of all sorts. I do like ebike subsidies though, and better public transport.

Similarly, it can make sense to help people improve their home's efficiency, and in some places grants are available for this (insulation, etc.). Though in many cases you're using renters' taxes to make the homeowner wealthier, which isn't really fair.

In Canada we get a carbon tax rebate, fixed per-head. A family of four will get up to $1800 in 2024-25, and rural areas get more than everyone else. High income households consume more of everything than low income households overall, so they still pay more carbon tax in absolute terms. Meanwhile the tax rebate is not income based. It balances out some of the regressiveness of the carbon tax.

https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2024/02/can...

EV subsidies can help build demand for the vehicles. As adoption grows, charging becomes more widely available and manufacturing costs come down with volume.

The past decade does not matter as till this year consumption growth was more than renewables additions that has changed in 2023 and will accelerate from 2024. So the tipping point has just been reached add electrification of transport and heating and fossil fuel use will come down a lot faster than people owning fossil fuel reserves would like for the world to realize. In 2024 we will add almost more solar than all the solar installs in the world till 2020.

The problem is not how much solar we add, but that it is not corresponded with a reduction of demand of fossil fuels. Not sure about 2024, but at least for the years of the ourworldindata info it was still on its way up. And the solution is not just maintaining the same levels of the previous year, but dropping to zero far before there is no way out anymore.

Ah no it is we are not eating fossil fuel it is used to produce energy if an alternative cheaper source of energy comes up world will start replacing fossil fuels. You will see the effect of this in the next 3-4 years as solar and battery price out fossil fuels for electricity first and 10+ years when they start pricing out fossil fuels for other energy use. Where as global warming I am pessimistic about it I think we have already crossed the point of no return for me solar and cheap electricity would allow humans to survive easier in a warming world.

Any timelines we impose are artificial. Setting deadlines hasn't really helped accomplish as much as simply changing the economics has in recent years. The reason solar power is popular is simply that it saves people money on their electricity bills. That wasn't always true. But now that it is, we see huge growth at both grid level and domestic level of its deployment.

You are right we are still expanding the use of fossil fuels. But we do seem to be on a path where the peak usage is happening in the reasonably near future. The faster than expected adoption of renewables is bringing that moment forward.

I regularly read what Bloomberg NEF publishes on this topic. They published an interesting article recently: https://about.bnef.com/blog/designing-and-delivering-net-zer...

They are calling for short term policy changes to accelerate things. Most of those policies are simply about incentivizing people doing the right things.

In the US, the rate at which we install utility scale solar and wind is currently limited by how quickly we can upgrade the grid to support it, with interconnect wait lists taking over 5 years in some areas[1]. Lifting tariffs wouldn't speed things up without fixing that first.

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...

The government also sets up regulations that protect incumbent electricity generators.

Delaying a renewable facility from earning money for years when it has to borrow everything up front to start is extra deadly. I want proper environmental review though, to the extent it's possible to have that without it being weaponized by NIMBYs to simply run out the clock on a project's viability.

Interconnect is going to be old news once batteries and balance-of-system costs get low enough. Local microgrids at the substation level are going to be the way to go, with only a minority of current traveling long distances (except for certain natural features, i.e. hydroelectric)

Our car can run our all-electric house for days. We have more than one car.

It’s not clear to me how much the power grid will matter in ten years. I can imagine cities using substations to route N solar installations to M bidirectional EV chargers, I guess. For places as or less dense than suburbs, it’s not obvious that it makes sense to bother.

The power grid will always be absolutely essential. I have no idea why you'd think otherwise.

Our home battery has had ~ 10 minutes of scheduled downtime in three years, and the solar array we put in (which was limited in size by our power company) would be enough for 90+% of days. The grid has had 30+ days of downtime in that time.

If we had it fill the south half of our roof, that’d jump to 99-100%. For the remaining one percent, we could just drive to a fast charger to pick up enough electricity to run the house for 2-3 days in complete darkness.

The power grid keeps burning cities down, and then they pass the cost on to consumers.

Off grid is already more reliable than the grid, and the price of it keeps halving. At the same time, extreme weather events keep increasing the cost of the grid and lowering its reliability.

If the power company would bury their lines, then all of these issues would go away, but that will never happen with our current political system.

Do these figures include heat and hot water? In my climate these are the big energy consumers.

This argument is undermined by survivorship bias. I also don't believe the power grid keeps "burning cities down", this seems very specific to the area you live and the competency of the local government.

It would still speed up behind-the-meter installations for existing grid connections. Rooftop solar, commercial and industrial customers adding battery energy storage, etc.

To put this statement into perspective, see this graph "Global primary energy consumption by source"

https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years

1. Share of solar is negligible 2. New sources of energy have always come on top of existing sources, never replaced them

Sure, look at that chart. According to that chart, we'll burn coal forever. Now, consult reality for a moment, or take a look around. Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century. So your "always" is at best temporarily true, and thus worthless, it can't actually have predictive power.

Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely.

In 2014 there was more "traditional biomass" (ie people burn stuff) than today. Since this practice is extremely inefficient it makes sense to see it phased out, cooking food over a literal log fire is simple but that's the only upside.

Also Solar looks like about 2.5% to me. How is that "negligible" ? Is the population of Bangladesh "negligible"? That's about 2.5% of the world's population.

>Coal is finite, a resources stored away over a tremendous period of time, much of it burned in about a century

Sure, it's finite, but we will run out of oil and natural gas much faster than of coal. There are centuries worth of known economically viable coal reserves. Even more, if we count low-quality lignite and peat reserves.

Do those 'centuries' include the large increases in power demands across the world, ( as the wider world develops ) and the requirement to replace the missing oil and gas when they run out?

People would choke to death before we could use that much coal, so I doubt that will matter. It’s effectively infinite: We have access to more than we will ever want to use.

> Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely.

I mean that new energy sources came in addition to existing ones. We consume as much wood as we ever did. Coal didn't reduce wood usage. Oil didn't reduce coal and so on...

Nuclear did remove almost completely fossil fuels from the French electricity grid. Only example I know of of a grid that succeeded in getting rid of almost all fossil fuels. (transport and heating keep using a lot of fossils however)

Please also see this article, which includes useful extrapolations: https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar...

Also, please notice that between 2021 (the date of your link) and today the amount of global solar power quadrupled and the growth is exponential.

The growth looks exponential (and technically probably is, just not in the normal sense of that phrase).

Like any physical process, it’s likely to be limited and follow something more like a Logistic function, which looks exponential at the start but ceases to follow that curve forever (which matters for making multi-decade projections).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function

Citing "primary" energy is a great way to be off by several factors on any estimate.

Electrification results in 2x-5x less energy use for nearly every large energy application. Take, for example, heat humps. Fossil fuels are only something like 95% efficient, whereas heat pumps product 200%-500% efficient. Same goes for EVs over fuel engines, etc.

Old sources of energy get replaced all the time. Not sure why you think that's not the case...

Primary energy usage is an awful metric. When replacing ICE cars with EVs we do not need to replace the energy used with a 1:1 ratio. The ICE is 20-35% efficient, and this is spread across the supply chain for both the fuel and the car itself.

See this amazing flow chart on useful vs. rejected energy:

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/

there was a quote, and I can't remember exactly so I paraphrase: "the person who creates a new form of energy for the world, without creating an equivalent heatsink, would be history's greatest monster", although I suppose that is very perfect being the enemy of the good.

I don't think that is "very perfect being the enemy of the good" at all. Any new energy source (like fusion) would be a very real threat to mankind, see also https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...

He very early assumes/disregards we remain confined to earth. In the face of exponentially growing energy resources, this is a terrible assumption.

Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun?

The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same.

See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett

https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...

Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8

The point is that you can have exponential growth in human energy consumption without exponentially heating the Earth by having the growth take place off-planet. Which is hardly irrelevant to the people still there, e.g. if you find your data centers are using too much power, put them in space. The computation may take a megawatt-hour but transmitting the result back to the surface is only a few watt-seconds for a radio link.

Likewise, the humans who live on other planets can be consuming local energy without heating Earth, and the people still on Earth would still get the value of their inventions, discoveries and writings.

> you can have exponential growth in human energy consumption without exponentially heating the Earth by having the growth take place off-planet

No. It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?

In any event exponential growth in human energy consumption is physically unrealizable. Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.

- - - -

The point is that anyone who good enough at physics to invent a free energy generator also understands why it must be kept secret. Some secrets keep themselves. That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them. Like the Philosophers' Stone the point of the technology is the internal transformation it engenders when you actually confront the thing itself.

> It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?

Why does it seem unrealistic? More than that, you only need one of those things. You could have population growth with declining energy consumption if energy use is moved off-planet (even if the population benefits from the off-planet use), or increasing local energy use per-capita if local population is declining, e.g. because the number of people leaving to explore other planets is higher than the population growth rate.

> Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.

The universe is a lot bigger than the solar system.

> That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them.

Uh, nope. That's not why you can't buy one.

At this point we're just trading sci-fi story ideas. If we can learn to manage our population growth and/or energy consumption growth, then that's awesome!

Watch the Bartlett lecture.

The original claim was essentially that energy use can't increase past a certain point because it would result in too much energy density. The obvious flaw in the claim is that it assumes no ability to increase the volume of space in which the energy use takes place, which is an invalid premise. Space is really big.

No, dude, even if you postulate FTL spaceships, the size of the Universe doesn't matter, you always eventually become an explosion. All exponential growth curves are S-shaped.

At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.

Yeah, Ehrlich will be right any day now. Just you watch . . .

We don't even know for sure that the universe is finite. You're going to run out of hydrogen before you run out of somewhere to put the heat.

> e.g. if you find your data centers are using too much power, put them in space.

…put them in space how far away from Earth exactly? If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again. If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.

> If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again.

So put a mirror on the Earth side of it?

> If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.

There are many compute tasks where latency is irrelevant. To take a recent example, AI model training. It does not matter if the compute farm is a few light minutes away when the computation itself is going to take days to months.

Maintenance is performed locally. It's not as if you're going to have Earth and then a single solitary server farm on the far side of the Sun. By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.

> Maintenance is performed locally. […] By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.

It seems whether or not you can keep maintenance staff close-by would depend on the temperatures of those server farms. Yes, the regime in which this could work might be fairly large but remember that we're talking about exponential growth of energy production here and the whole reason behind moving the power plants (and server farms) to deep space was that they were emitting enough heat to affect planet-level thermodynamics.

But that still doesn't affect energy density. If you want twice as many server farms then you build twice as many space stations in twice the volume of space and the energy density remains constant.

> But that still doesn't affect energy density.

But it does? I think you're confusing energy density with power density. The former is an integral over time and would be monotically increasing with time since nuclear fusion would allow us to basically pull energy out of of thin (ok, maybe not so thin) air.

> Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun?

The Earth sheds its own heat into outer space via black body radiation, and we can help this process by shedding heat in specific infrared bands that pass right through the atmosphere. We already have radiative cooling paints that do this, and they can achieve sub-ambient air temps in full sunlight:

* https://www.sri.com/fcd_technology/self-cooling-paint-a-pass...

* https://cera.cool/

* https://hackaday.com/2023/07/03/cooling-paint-you-can-actual...

Yes, and those are really cool and I want some.

We might be able to somehow collect heat (with superconductors? I don't know) and beam it into space, but that still doesn't solve the problem.

Please watch the Bartlett lecture, please?

Isn’t this why solar is good. We already have the heat sink (earth) we just aren’t using the energy.

Not exactly because the Earth naturally reflects a large amount of solar energy back into space.

A lot of that is from clouds that are above the panels

That's more of the solution than the problem. Most of the light is absorbed rather than reflected, but causing more to be reflected isn't that hard, e.g. cover a large surface area of low value land or ocean with cheap reflective material.

This should reduce carbon emissions, but the dow.stream consequences seem complex and difficult to anticipate. For instance, what happens to human consumption of other resources when energy becomes essentially free? How much cheaper does it become, say, to exploit, extract, refine, and manufacture? And if extraction becomes cheaper, maintaining oil infrastructure becomes arguably a simple matter of industrial convenience: why bother to change when it's only becoming cheaper?

Focusing on reducing emissions is important, but it's only the first step of the plan. If we want to be anywhere near the 2°C scenario, starting from 2050, we need to be sequestering carbon directly from the atmosphere.

So I'm okay with people spending a little effort on step 2 of the plan now, especially given that we don't have yet proven technology to realise it.

It is crazy to me that there are any tariffs anywhere on solar panels. You can make them more efficiently? Great.

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