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Comment by streetfighter64 | Hacker News Reader

> Invest in nuclear power and nukes > See North Korea vs Iran.

Both countries invested in nukes (it is claimed). Only Iran didn't get there in time, before the US stepped in to stop them (it is claimed). So unless the US lets you, it's probably a bad idea to invest in nukes, no? Or is your point that the US's nuke story was a lie, and that Iran actually should have invested in nukes?

> Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV

Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work? My gut feeling is that even if you put solar panels on literally every structure, you'd be far off from managing to power every vehicle. See if I get around to calculating later, but I at least advise you to do so yourself before making this argument.

> EVs are batteries on wheels! They can go charge and come back

Uh... Cars are fuel tanks on wheels...

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Yes, Iran’s problem was they didn’t develop nuclear weapons.

The lesson all countries will take from Ukraine, Iran, and North Korea is: develop nuclear weapons.

Ukraine and Iran both don’t have nuclear weapons and they were both attacked by countries that do. North Korea does have them and they are apparently in no danger of being attacked.

North Korea's nuclear capabilities isn't what kept them from being attacked. It was Seoul being in artillery range and the refugee crisis on the chinese border that would result.

> North Korea does have them and they are apparently in no danger of being attacked.

North Korea was never in danger of being attacked anyway. They don’t need nuclear weapons to flatten Seoul. The only country capable of invading NK is China, and they benefit much more from NK remaining buffer zone.

The moral of the story is you should always invest in nukes, since if you don't the US will just lie and say you are developing nukes as a pretext anyway.

This also applies to WMDs in general.

Sure, do the math and get back.

First, do the math for millions of acres of Ethanol, a small fraction of fuel additive.

Using the same acres for solar with be sufficient for the entire energy (all forms of energy) many times over.

Look man, why haven't you done the math? It's your argument after all. Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power. Plus you need a battery bank to store it during the day, supposing you're charging at night.

So, now you do the math how many trucks and how much area for solar panels a typical military has.

I don't need to do any calculations for combustion engines: IT'S WHAT THE MILITARY IS USING RIGHT NOW TODAY!

Just for the Ethanol acres. 30 million acres for a small fraction of fuel. Instead use the same acres for solar panels.

Annual Electricity Generated is 26,300 TWh/year.

Over 6× total U.S. annual electricity consumption (~4,100 TWh/year). This is enough to electrify everything in US.

Solar panels don't feed a nation, giving up fertile land for panels is a bad idea. Put them where you can't grow anything.

The ethanol argument is a dying cause.

Eh. Just stop feeding your crops to cows and you need a lot less space to grow stuff. Also you can put the panels on marginal lands first and save a lot of actual good land for grains and vegetables.

You consume ethanol as food? Ethanol is supposed to go into gas cars, via the fossil fuel supply chain.

It’s not an either / or… animals such as sheep can coexist with solar panels and yields go up

Cattle love solar panels - I’ve seen fields of them in southern Germany, almost all hanging out in the shade while munching grass.

Corn for bioethanol is not feeding the nation, it's exploiting the fertile land to literally burn the output.

The argument about corn is to actually stop the waste of the fertile land for fuel. Solar panels can be installed wherever they're necessary, no one is proposing replacing the corn in situ.

> Anyway, a very optimistic calculations means you need the flat area of at least 800 m^2 in a sunny climate, to charge a single electric truck to full power.

The math the person you're replying to was talking about was solar power vs ethanol. While your 800 m^2 sounds like a lot of land area for enough solar panels to fully charge a large electric truck, it's basically nothing compared to how much land area you'd need to grown enough corn to produce enough ethanol to power a similar truck. It's about 500 times as much land area, a fairly obvious result when you consider you get solar power from the land basically every day and corn once a year. Growing plants for ethanol is dumb.

Of course the benefit of a combustion engine is that you don't need to grow corn to make ethanol for it, at least as long as you can get fossil fuels out of the ground and the enemy doesn't disrupt your supply chain for drilling and refining fuel oil. But that's irrelevant since that wasn't the land-use comparison the parent poster was making.

I have done the math, several times. The last time was to plan a hypothetical solar "highway gas station" capable of charging 100 teslas EVs per hour 24/7/365. Assuming flat ground at Vancouver's latitude, it came to a solar farm approaching square kilometers/miles in scale.

10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh Solar panels nominaly produce 1000kwh/m so 24,000m2 of panels... if facing the sun perfectly during normal day/night cycles. But non-equator latitudes need far more land than that because the sun isnt directly overhead, plus winter/rainy days... it is a massive solar farm (and a massive battery) just to replace an average highway gas station.

Given that any future 2-lane highway might see a couple thousand thousand EVs each hour, each needing charging every couple hundred miles, the number and size of solar charging stations per mile is crazy.

I've done the math. The average car in Canada does 11,000 miles a year. A Tesla isn't great efficiency, it uses about 3.5 miles per kWh. Throw in inefficiency of charging and you're talking about 3MWh per car per year, and with about 25 million vehicles that means about 75TWh a year

Travers Solar in Alberta generates about 2.5TWh a year from under 14 sqkm.

Build 30 of them and that's 400 sqkm.

A 20sqkm by 20sqkm solar plant would power every car and light van in Canada forever (setting aside seasonality).

Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.

That's less than 1 quarter of 1 percent of the land in Alberta alone.

(Of course you wouldn't put it in one location, it would be spread out across the country)

Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)

You'd have a lot of excess power in the summer -- you'd be generating 650TWh of excess power a year

Lol, 11,000 is for all the city-bound teslas that only drive from suburb to the office. Actual average car use is closer to 25,000km/year (15,000 miles is the us average). But cars are not all road users. The "100 teslas/hour" standard is to accomidate trucks too.

If you are planning infrastructure like highways, national averages are irrelevant. It is the same debate that Hertz had when it dropped teslas: charging infrastructure is local and rental car locations (airports) cannot support the needed power density.

The math is already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49952816

Averages are meaningless. You need to understand trips.

28% of trips are under a mile, 52% under three, 64% under five, 79% under ten, 93% under twenty-five, and 98% under 50 miles.

Only 0.8% of the trips are over 100 miles!

> Lol, 11,000 is for all the city-bound teslas that only drive from suburb to the office.

Most countries have electricity at home and at office. They can charge at both locations. If you are still using kerosene lamps and haven't started using electricity at home, you have bigger problems than charging infrastructure.

You provide no evidence of the number of cars or the kilometres driven

23.5 million light-duty vehicles

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241021/dq241...

If each one were to drive 25,000 km (way higher than the NJC assume on https://www.njc-cnm.gc.ca/s3/d896/en, way higher than the insurance complanies say is the average - https://affiliatedinsurance.ca/blogs/how-average-mileage-per...)

It would require electricity to provide for 587500 million km of driving each year, that's about 118,000 million kWh, or 118 TWh.

Your statement

> 10kwh x 100 x 24 = 24,000kwh Solar panels

Is tricky to understand what you are on abbout as it's not clear what on earth you mean by this as solar panels aren't measured in kWh. kWh per year perhaps.

You are talking about delivering power to a specific location, not generating power. This is an argument from a decade ago, reality has proven that isn't a problem.

For what its worth, I drive over 30,000 km a year and very rarely use a public charger.

> Factor in lower generation in December, you'd need 10 times that amount of solar, about 70km by 70km, 5000 square km.

Or, convert the solar energy to heat, then back to electricity at 40% round trip efficiency. Needs only 2.5x the solar (or less, because some solar goes directly to the users without long term storage). The heat is very storable at scale, even for seasonal storage.

> Funnily enough 5000 square km is about the total land use of Canada's oil land use (surface use)

Please also consider land for biofuel/biodiesel.

1 in 3 acres of Canadian canola (amounting to roughly 7 million acres of farmland) goes directly into producing feedstock for the global and domestic biofuel markets. https://www.canadiancattlemen.ca/daily/conservatives-diesel-...

For 7 million acres (Canadian acres - 16% Capacity Factor)

Annual Electricity Generation (16% CF): ~4,467 Terawatt-hours (TWh/year)

National Scale Comparison:~7.4× Canada's total annual electricity consumption (~600 TWh/year)

Don't do the math for homeless people. Most people live in homes. Homes usually have electricity, unless you live in a 4th world country. All buildings have electricity. Just park and plug in.

You need to go to a gas station BECAUSE there is no supply of gasoline straight to home. Homes have electricity. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, South Sudan, Yemen, remotest village in India. I don't know where you live, but if your home doesn't have electricity, your country has bigger problems to deal with than buying Teslas and DC Fast Chargers.

Highways. Highways need to support people traveling beyond the range of thier vehicles, be that a car or bus/truck. People could also eat and use the bathroom at home, but highways must still make space for restaurants and restrooms.

I ran into that problem during covid. I had to do a few work-related 1000-mile drives and they had closed most all the restrooms!

And my home is also home to a few hundred other people. Installing enough chargers for all our cars would require a massive grid upgrade that our city would never support. Not everyone lives in a suburb.

Highways often have powerlines nearby at least every now and then. With those you can take power from roofs many kilometres away!

And what you say about apartments is wrong, it’s definitely not impossible. I’ve heard of plenty of apartment blocks installing chargers, they have load management systems to manage the load and believe it or not, not every single apartment occupant will need to charge their car every day at exactly the same time as everyone else!

Except not every home has a driveway. With on street parking the norm in many places. Trailing a lead to your car on the other side of the road is frowned upon

Streets have streetlights. Streetlights are on poles. Poles have electricity that lights need. Utility can add chargers. Magically, the problem is solved.

Streetlights are low power.

Car chargers are high power.

For example https://electricbrighton.com/news/considerations-for-lamp-po... says charging times are 18 hours, which is hardly overnight.

Plus you couldn't do it anywhere where thieves steal copper. Car charging cables would quickly become a theft target.

Thats 18 hours if your battery is at 0%.

Most people drive 20 - 40 miles/day, hardly 10% of the battery. You will be fine.

You could also charge at work. They should have more than lamp posts.

Home solar arrays are 10-100kw (order of magnitude).

EVs go 2-5 miles per kWh.

So, the charge rate is 20-500 miles per hour when the sun is out.

Assume one extra EV per house, round robin. New EVs are $10-60K, depending on county. The solar is, say, $30K.

So, $60-210K per house for ten years of energy independence for a two car ICE house. ICE cars wear out faster than EVs. You can figure gas, grid and inflated maintenance on the ICE route yourself, but the math works.

Of course, used EVs more than halve my estimates,

> ICE cars wear out faster than EVs

Gonna need a citation on that, given that the average EV battery lifetime is 10-20 years.

> Uh... Cars are fuel tanks on wheels...

Sure, but you don't have inexhaustible source of crude oil and a refinery in your backyard!

But Sun reliably shows up most days. It doesn't ghost. Sunlight can't be sanctioned, tariffed, taxed, embargoed, pirated, nuked, rebuked, rebuffed, offended. Sunlight is also compatible with most religious beliefs (god is light, etc).

> most days

cries

> a refinery in your backyard

Funny thing is, fuel can be transported, so that's not needed!

If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.

And if you're going the solar route, you still need the raw materials to build the solar panels (and batteries, and EVs) in the first place. They don't grow on trees.

I'm sure we'll see a transition to electric some day, it is more efficient purely from a physics standpoint. But I'd be shocked to see the military transition before civilian industry.

Most countries do not have enough to independently supply their own energy needs from fossil fuels, and they need to import more or less continuously, while renewable energy infrastructure needs building out and then lasts a very long time. This massively affects the strategic effects of losing your supply: one becomes an acute problem very quickly while the other is still a problem but it takes a lot longer to become a real problem.

I don't think the main focus is on converting military operations themselves to work without fossil fuels, but more that if you can convert your civilian industry then you have a much better overall strategic position because your total demand for fossil fuels is much lower. (Strategy is a lot more than just your military)

> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.

That won't help you if you can't refine it. Russia has more oil than most and has/had lots of refineries. Ukraine has taken out so many of them that Trump is complaining it's affecting the price of diesel (even though the US also has lots of oil and lots of refineries).

Oil infrastructure is temporary, expensive and fragile whereas panels work for 30 years.

You only need solar panels once. They do not need fueling, refueling, lubricants, anything at all.

Solar panels have 25 year warranty. Can you think of anything that you have bought or can buy with a 25 year warranty?

At the end of 25 years, they will produce 92%. Perfectly acceptable for a few more decades. The latest panels produce 740 - 800W+/panel, this is sufficient for a lifetime without ever having to think of upgrades.

> If you want to look at the geopolitics of it, all of the bigger countries do in fact have their own sources of oil and their own refineries.

The problem is net usage. The UK has oil fields and it owns refineries, but it uses a lot more fuel than could be extracted and processed with these operations even if somehow Capitalism was dead and the State seized control of everything for domestic use rather than corporate profit.

The energy balance data I've looked at doesn't go back more than this century so maybe in the 1980s or something it would have been theoretically possible, but it isn't today and hasn't been for decades.

> But Sun reliably shows up most days.

Gonna need a citation on that, where I live in the Midwest there are legitimately times where I haven't seen the sun for 2 straight weeks. Not to mention some latitudes I've lived at where the sun doesn't get up till like 9 and is already almost gone by 4.

Like AZ, CA, Texas sure go nuts solarizing. But there are plenty of people for whom that's not really an option.

Its okay, you don't need to believe it.

Solar panels work even if its cloudy: Power generation typically drops to 10% to 25% of normal capacity under heavy, grey overcast skies, but can reach 40% to 60% (or higher) under thin or partly cloudy skies.

> > Solar on every structure, every vehicle is an EV

> Have you done any calculations as to whether this would actually work?

Yes. All cars and vans in the UK drive a total of 320 billion miles a year. My own electric car tells me this would require 80 billion kWh. 1kWp produces 1000 kWh a year, so you need 80 million kWp or 80 TWh a year.

My house will easily provide 8kWp, meaning you'd need 10 million houses. There's 30 million homes, and that's before you factor in non-domestic buildings.

A single shooting estate in the uk could produce 20TWh a year with solar alone. Throw in wind and that would petty much double.

Well, if you want the solar power to only cover the cars and vans, sure. What about all the trucks needed for transportation?

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