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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

Future generations will laugh at us for harnessing such primitive sources of energy when "the sun is just out there" and available to the planet 24/7.

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To be fair on fossil fuels, they are simply stored energy from the sun. You can think of them like a dense battery, more dense than our current battery technology allows.

'Density' is not the concern we all have about fossil fuels. It's the effects on the atmosphere.

I believe gp was saying that density is an advantage for fossil fuels. Nobody thinks it’s a disadvantage/problem for fossil fuels.

Density is the concern we all have for solar.

Solar is so diffuse, just bringing it to where people need it has doubled the price purely in transmission infrastructure costs.

Reference: Australia - the place that’s supposed to be solar’s poster child has more than doubled electricity prices in the last three to four years because, unsurprisingly (we were warned), getting solar and wind to where they’re needed turns out to be incredibly expensive.

Sure, though there’s a difference between extracting energy stored for millions of years and capturing the continuous flow of energy from the sun.

> Sure, though there’s a difference between extracting energy stored for millions of years and capturing the continuous flow of energy from the sun.

The former is actually continuous, and thus far more reliable. The latter requires coming up with some other storage mechanism. Granted, we have ways to do this already. But it's still not a trivial project.

The availability of such large amounts of energy just delays our actions to make our energy use more efficient. We burn liters of gasoline to move a single person a few kilometers. This is not efficient and only made possible by fossil fuel energy abundance (for now, it's borrowed time).

    a dense battery with too much side effects (fumes, CO_2/etc. gases)

    a less dense battery with much less side effects.

I think the choice is clear.

A dense battery with recharge time measured in millions of years? Be careful how quickly you discharge!

This means not running infra for half the day (and when the weather goes bad), halving the return on investment of anything relying only on solar. That's definitely a choice but not sure if people are ready for this. Of course storage solves this but storage sounds it is a bigger problem than "put solar everywhere you can".

What's important is the cost of the total electricity production apparatus, seasonal storage and transport included. (and environmental cost and availability, meaning fossil fuels should be avoided)

And, a similar argument could be made that "just a tiny bit of uranium can provide so much power, why are we not using it?" completely disregarding the infrastructure cost of nuclear. So this argument does not make much sense IMO.

(to be clear, I'm not saying we should not do anything, just that it's not as easy as it sounds)

We are getting to storage solutions already. But I think many of us think nuclear for base load and massively overbuilt solar and wind so that we can handle the full electrification of our system would be a net economic win as well as an environmental one.

Also, consider that we have a connected grid outside of Texas and that the weather is not usually bad everywhere.

The problem is that there isn’t any ”base load” when you’ve introduced renewables.

Take a look at the South Australian grid for a peek into the future. How would you introduce a nuclear baseload to this grid? Turn it off for days on end when renewables deliver?

https://explore.openelectricity.org.au/energy/sa1/?range=7d&...

Do you laugh at put ancestors for using wood in early stone age?

No, but I'd laugh at them for using wood after discovering oil, the same way people will laugh at us for using oil 100 years after discovering solar/wind/geothermal/ocean/hydropower energies.

There are no good hydro power sites left. Well, there are, but good luck getting approval for new hydro in this climate.

Wave energy is dead in the water.

Not to mention burning coal after we have nuclear fission.

https://seia.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/SMI20Q2202024_Ch...

I think they will point to the growth rate of capability and squabble over alternative histories.

Eg. If China was a friendly nation to its neighbors, the world would be more comfortable subsidizing their manufacturing and building out solar faster. https://share.google/images/fR5VmXmlygHn6yL2g

Or they will laugh at us trying to harness the sun in regions far from the equator, requiring a full fallback fossile infrastructure for winter time, while having a few moderns nuclear reactors would be more reliable and cost effective. Time will tell.

“Why didn’t they wear their government mandated orolo while wheeling around their power cube?”

There's not much wrong with using fossil fuels but we should consider the tradeoffs here. It takes time and opportunity cost to spin up the infra required for solar energy so it is not practical to do it in an instant.

> It takes time and opportunity cost to spin up the infra required for solar energy so it is not practical to do it in an instant.

we did it for the fossil/oil infra, and that inarguably takes more time and energy compared to building solar farms.

Why do you think we don’t do it now? Simply lack of knowledge?

Huh? Solar is getting produced now in larger quantities than ever. And people are finally warming to the idea of nuclear again.

Globally, solar hasn’t even started to look like it might want to consider putting a dent in fossil fuel usage.

There are three big GHG emitting sectors, electricity, transport, and agriculture, and solar has only started to scratched the surface in a handful of countries electricity production.

The scale of solar / wind rollout necessary to make a significant impact globally is truly stupendous.

Look at this graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Australia

The more solar and wind you have, the more gas you need.

Batteries, the ones that haven’t even been built yet, are only at hours-of-capacity scale. We need weeks of backup capacity, which is why we need gas.

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