Abundance: Aplenty for All
January 11, 2023 1:49 AM   Subscribe

Making energy too cheap to meter - "The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy. Restarting progress means getting energy that is so abundant that it's almost free."

The Dystopia We Fear Is Keeping Us From the Utopia We Deserve [ungated] - "Clean, abundant energy is the foundation on which a more equal, just and humane world can be built."[1]

Why Paul Ehrlich got everything wrong - "And why we should still listen to warnings about environmental catastrophes."[2]

Degrowth Is Not the Answer to Climate Change - "In planning for a green economic future, the Left should keep in mind the words of the great socialist Sylvia Pankhurst: 'Socialism means plenty for all. We do not preach a gospel of want and scarcity, but of abundance.'"[3]

Degrowth: A Call for Radical Abundance - "By de-enclosing social goods and restoring the commons, we can ensure that people are able to access the things that they need to live a good life without having to generate piles of income in order to do so, and without feeding the never-ending growth machine. 'Private riches' may shrink, as Lauderdale pointed out, but public wealth will increase. In this sense, degrowth is the very opposite of austerity. While austerity calls for scarcity in order to generate growth, degrowth calls for abundance in order to render growth unnecessary."[4]

Reminder for whenever you hear the term 'personal carbon footprint' - "The use of household carbon footprint calculators originated when oil producer BP hired Ogilvy to create an 'effective propaganda' campaign to shift responsibility of climate change-causing pollution away from the corporations and institutions that created a society where carbon emissions are unavoidable and onto personal lifestyle choices."
  • @AlecStapp: "Texas is building much more clean energy capacity than California."
  • @duncan__c: "Impulse Labs, an induction stove start-up based out of San Francisco."
  • @sdamico: "2022: the IRA adds massive subsidies to induction and batteries. 2023: this."
GM, Ford, Google partner to promote 'virtual' power plants - "Virtual power plants pool together thousands of decentralized energy resources like electric vehicles or electric heaters controlled by smart thermostats. With permission from customers, they use advanced software to react to electricity shortages with such techniques as switching thousands of households' batteries, like those in EVs, from charge to discharge mode or prompting electricity-using devices, such as water heaters, to back off their consumption."

Round-the-Clock Clean Power Doesn't Cost a Fortune, Study Shows [ungated] - "California power agency modeling shows 24/7 renewable power can be cost-competitive."

The Great American EV Battery Revolution Might Finally Be Here [ungated] - "Companies plan dozens of factories in hopes of building a domestic supply chain from scratch."

China Has Set Its Sights on Cornering Another Green Energy Market: Hydrogen [ungated] - "Policymakers in Europe and the US are racing to counteract early Chinese dominance of electrolyzers, a key piece in the next generation of clean energy."
posted by kliuless (59 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
"Energy too cheap to measure..."

"This generation of nuclear reactors is safe.."

The thing about getting old is that eventually they repeat the same lies and you stop needing to investigate their claims. Where is this magical unlimited energy coming from? Batteries, hydrogen, etc. are just storage and more efficient networks just move energy around better. Where is the energy coming from?

Energy, in physics, is an accounting tool that turned out to be really useful for understanding our world and as a tool it's imposes a pretty strict discipline. Where is this energy coming from?
posted by rdr at 2:18 AM on January 11, 2023 [17 favorites]


I'm currently in the process of starting a solar panel project on my home. Will be up by summer, I think. And on the list of requirements for my next EV is some kind of smart storage (V2H or something similar). Will be interesting to see where this journey takes us, but I'll be surprised if the energy prices drop to where I can totally disregard the price.
posted by Harald74 at 2:29 AM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


Klassik kliuless! Thanks for posting this, I can't wait to read it.

I have a big solar plant on my barn, and a battery to store the surplus energy, and April - September, the energy bill is so small I can basically disregard it. I do run appliances during daytime.

During winter, when I rely on a grid of renewables (mostly wind, some hydro), the bill is a bit larger, but not terrible. I think if there was the political will to build a public common European grid, we could get very close to free energy.
Maybe the war in Ukraine is helping some people understand that we need to free ourselves from big fossil fuel business. But they don't want to let go and there may have to be an actual revolution to get rid of them.

In the city, we are also on an all-renewable grid, and my bills are very low here too. I think 1200 kroner a year, but I'll have to check after work. Or heating comes from a huge waste incinerator with a skiing slope on top of it and is also quite affordable.
posted by mumimor at 3:29 AM on January 11, 2023 [14 favorites]


Where is the energy coming from?
Solar, wind, heatpumps, tidal, geothermal (hydro probably at near peak already).
Pumped storage and battery farms for load smoothing (including using distributed home systems), maaaybe green hydro for transport.

The first three come from solar energy, directly or from heating the Earth; tidal from the gravitational force from the moon (and to a lesser extent) the sun, and the last is a combo of solar heating and leftover heat from the formation of the planet.

All are indeed amazingly abundant resources, effectively unlimited from our scale, and the price to build machines to convert that energy to useful form is getting cheaper faster than even optimists usually predict.

Given the absolutely obscene profit margin from price-fixing of fossil fuel extraction - leading to regulatory and political capture, and massive subsidies - fossil fuel companies are hanging on, but rapidly replacing them in bulk with renewable sources for most purposes is largely a political problem, not a physics or engineering one, and even financially it's more cost efficient to build renewables than fossil, even ignoring the unpaid externality of pollution.

Is it possible to switch 100% of everything to renewables right now? No, probably not (jet fuel f.ex). But we can get a hell of a lot closer to it a LOT faster than our current trajectory. And once current uses are changed, nothing stops us from keep going and making energy far more abundant. High energy use currently comes at a terrible price of climate destruction. There's no law of physics that says it has to, when we have an absolutely stonkin fusion reactor right up there throwing the energy at us 24/7!
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 3:43 AM on January 11, 2023 [26 favorites]


Where is this magical unlimited energy coming from?

So my house costs A$800,000. I have a A$9,000 solar system (6.6kW) which I paid A$6,000 for, after accounting for green credits. I'm not eligible for a further $1,800 in credits which are for households below A$180,000 annual income. The house is pure electric, so heating, cooling, cooking, hot water, all electric, no fossil fuels.

Jan 1 - 2kWh imports, 27kWh exports
Jan 2 - 4kWh imports, 28kWh exports
Jan 3 - 3kWh imports, 25kWh exports
Jan 4 - 10kWh imports, 8kWh exports
Jan 5 - 6kWh imports, 25kWh exports
Jan 6 - 3kWh imports, 38kWh exports
Jan 7 - 2kWh imports, 39kWh exports
Jan 8 - 2kWh imports, 37kWh exports
Jan 9 - 3kWh imports, 39kWh exports
Jan 10 - 2kWh imports, 34kWh exports

Even disregarding the green credits, for about 1% of the value of my home, I am exporting 8 times more energy than I am using in summer. In the worst month of winter, I import about 3 times more than I export, due to consecutive rainy days. For context, where we live (in Melbourne Australia) summer is when the greatest grid demand occurs, leading to occasional blackouts and industry shutdowns, as people turn on their air conditioning to deal with heat that every year exceeds 40°C (104°F). So I am exporting the most energy just when the grid needs it the most.

For 1% of the value of my home, it feels good to be an overall net contributor to the grid. In a theoretical future, we would have a larger, more interconnected grid, with diversified sources of solar and wind from far flung parts of the country, so that somewhere, there's always wind blowing and sun shining to keep the lights on.

As to how the energy in the grid is used - pumped hydro storage, selling to other states, or being used in energy intensive industries on sunny days - that's for the government to figure out. But the energy is there for the taking...
posted by xdvesper at 4:01 AM on January 11, 2023 [30 favorites]


Sorry, typo there - green hydro should be green hydrogen for transport, i.e. extracted from water via renewable energy, as opposed to blue hydrogen from natural gas, a trap set by the fossil fuel extraction companies to try and keep on business as usual.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 4:02 AM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


I think the "limitless" energy is exemplified in South Australia, I took a snapshot of their energy mix / price chart for a week in December, and energy prices are basically negative whenever the sun is shining.

So if you're a business in the day - like a factory, say you're smelting steel with an induction furnace - and you of course have access to wholesale grid pricing, you can use as much energy as you like, for free. There is literally too much energy in the system during the day, because the system needs to overbuild capacity of wind power so there's enough overnight.
posted by xdvesper at 4:14 AM on January 11, 2023 [6 favorites]




Where is this energy coming from?

A large nuclear fusion reactor located at an appropriate distance from major population centres, whose output is indeed unmetered.

The device also comes with planet-wide wireless distribution in the 400-800THz band. Recent decades have seen dramatic falls in the cost of compatible ground stations and this trend looks set to continue as consumer uptake increases.
posted by flabdablet at 5:22 AM on January 11, 2023 [25 favorites]


if you're a business in the day - like a factory, say you're smelting steel with an induction furnace - and you of course have access to wholesale grid pricing, you can use as much energy as you like, for free.

And it's not like induction smelting is even the easiest heavy industrial process to run on an intermittent basis. There are loads of industrial processes where energy is the dominant input cost, that produce commodities easier to stockpile than energy itself is, and where efficient operation doesn't require parts of the production chain to be maintained at smelter-like iding temperatures while waiting for electricity to get free again. Hydrogen/ammonia production and water desalination are just two totally obvious examples that immediately spring to mind.

People who insist that the supply grid must forever be designed in such a way as to guarantee "baseload" electricity availability are either unaware of or deliberately trying to distract attention from the implications of a variable-supply, renewables-based grid where energy genuinely is too cheap to meter for thousands of hours each year, and the increasing uptake of consumer-owned, consumer-controlled, very-high-capacity battery packs on wheels.
posted by flabdablet at 5:50 AM on January 11, 2023 [5 favorites]


High energy use currently comes at a terrible price of climate destruction. There's no law of physics that says it has to, when we have an absolutely stonkin fusion reactor right up there throwing the energy at us 24/7!

Said reactor also has an enviable record on uptime and output stability, which the piddly little imitations of it that we inexplicably remain committed to trying to deploy locally will struggle to match.
posted by flabdablet at 5:58 AM on January 11, 2023 [9 favorites]


A large nuclear fusion reactor located at an appropriate distance from major population centres, whose output is indeed unmetered.

The device also comes with planet-wide wireless distribution in the 400-800THz band. Recent decades have seen dramatic falls in the cost of compatible ground stations and this trend looks set to continue as consumer uptake increases.


That's all well and good, but one day it will start to fail and we'll need a new one to replace it. Who will do that for us? Certainly not some young man named Severian! We don't even know who he is! Rather, who *they* are!
posted by NoMich at 6:09 AM on January 11, 2023 [17 favorites]


That's all well and good, but one day it will start to fail and we'll need a new one to replace it.

Hopefully the Wolfe won’t already be at the door.
posted by notoriety public at 6:14 AM on January 11, 2023 [9 favorites]


Something that is slowing (though not stopping) the shift to renewables in the US and some other places is local opposition from people living close to where the wind or solar farms would be located. Here is a good Guardian article about one example, but this comes up frequently, though usually at lower intensity.

I've wondered how much of that opposition might evaporate or at least diminish if one of the perks of having a large wind or solar farm nearby was getting free or highly subsidized electricity? One of the ways these renewable projects are getting financed is by large companies who want to advertise their carbon-free status paying up front to get the plant built so that they can get their bespoke clean energy. But saying that the power is going to be sent to a tech company across the state isn't a local selling point, either.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:22 AM on January 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


Think of how much bitcoin you could mine with free or highly-subsidized electricity.
posted by ryanrs at 6:30 AM on January 11, 2023


You jest, but there exist a lot of tech-addled fuckwits who actually see doing that as a good idea.
posted by flabdablet at 6:39 AM on January 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


Something that is slowing (though not stopping) the shift to renewables in the US and some other places is local opposition from people living close to where the wind or solar farms would be located.

If more solar developers had the wit to negotiate partnership agreements with the owners of parking lots, almost all such opposition would disappear overnight. Everybody who parks likes being able to do so in the shade.
posted by flabdablet at 6:43 AM on January 11, 2023 [18 favorites]


The author of the book Ezra Klein mentions isn’t credible at all. As Klein notes, “Hall gives all this [poisoned rivers and streams, smog-choked cities, the jagged edge of climate change] short shrift, describing climate change as “a hangnail, not a hangman” (for whom, one wants to ask), and focusing on the villainy of lawyers and regulators and hippies.”

It’s a libertarian fantasy of “clean” nukes everywhere no meddling government to interfere with “progress.” It’s exactly where the current three centuries of cheap energy has gotten us: a plethora of consumer products at low-cost, if you don’t notice that the cost has been pushed onto the environment or to workers in exploited countries.

Even more hidden problems appear in places like California, where fully 20% of all the state’s generated power is used to pump water, giving us the ability to grow crops in a desert, which sounds great until you realize the ecological harm done by draining the Colorado (and other) Rivers into that desert. With unlimited power, I can guarantee there’d be a pipeline draining the Great Lakes into the Central Valley with no thought of future catastophes.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 6:46 AM on January 11, 2023 [15 favorites]


You jest, but there exist a lot of tech-addled fuckwits who actually see doing that as a good idea.

I'm not joking. I have a pile of datacenter servers that are about two generations out of date. The machines still work ok, but were decommissioned because newer servers are a lot more energy efficient than these old machines stuffed with Ivy Bridge Xeons and hundreds of gigs of DDR3 RAM.

Why shouldn't I turn these servers on? It's not even bad for the environment if it's all renewable, right?
posted by ryanrs at 6:51 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


There's a difference between "free" and "too cheap to meter."

A lot of people's internet connections (at least, the ones that aren't completely owned by untouchable monopolies) are too cheap to meter. They don't bother charging you by the gigabyte, but by the speed.

Energy too cheap to meter would (and should) still cost some money as a subscription, and the rate would probably be determined not by the amount of energy used but by how you want to get it (high voltage/multiphase, household voltage 3-phase, etc).
posted by tclark at 6:53 AM on January 11, 2023 [9 favorites]


Thanks for this post.
posted by penduluum at 7:05 AM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


Yeah, my servers will run just fine off whatever cheap/basic domestic electric service everyone else uses to charge their electric car, say 25 MWh/month.
posted by ryanrs at 7:06 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


Why shouldn't I turn these servers on? It's not even bad for the environment if it's all renewable, right?

You shouldn't turn them on to mine crypto because crypto is a harmful scam you shouldn't participate in. But if you've got them hooked up to a solar and battery array the only reason not to use them to use a dalle variant to generate an endless stream of Pop'n'fresh / Little Debbie porn for everyone's enjoyment and education is that there's arguably better things to do with that compute time.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 7:19 AM on January 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


With unlimited power, I can guarantee there’d be a pipeline draining the Great Lakes into the Central Valley with no thought of future catastophes.

I'd hope that with unlimited power there would be a pipeline bringing water from the Pacific to desalinization plants in the Central Valley, but I get your point.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 7:20 AM on January 11, 2023 [12 favorites]


I can guarantee there’d be a pipeline draining the Great Lakes into the Central Valley

The Great Lakes Compact was specifically engineered to prevent that outcome.

With respect to solar, my house is quite efficient, so my entire annual usage is offset by a nine-panel system. I'd have installed more, but PG&E refused to sign off on a system that could possibly be a net exporter of electricity -- in order to get my house connected to the grid (for net-metering, because I don't yet have batteries), I had to design the system such that it could not produce more than my house uses. Since my house is more efficient than they expected in their models (I made big efficiency upgrades shortly before going solar, so their "past performance" models were effectively obsolete), I managed to get my system to balance almost perfectly and still be approved for interconnect.

My bills are entirely non-bypassable fees and taxes; the electricity ends up being zero.
posted by aramaic at 7:23 AM on January 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


Why shouldn't I turn these servers on?

Because as a professional, your reputation is your livelihood.
posted by flabdablet at 7:39 AM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


Think of how much bitcoin you could mine with free or highly-subsidized electricity.

Isn't this why so many bitcoin mining operations were in Iceland? Cheap hydro.
posted by biffa at 7:47 AM on January 11, 2023


The thinking that simply replacing "dirty" energy with "clean" energy will save us, is just more of the same grow, consume, repeat mentality that has gotten us to this point.

Of course solar, wind and other cheap and seemingly inexhaustible energy sources will eventually dominate, but all the other problems associated with rampant consumerism will still remain.

Jevons Paradox
, remember.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:57 AM on January 11, 2023 [14 favorites]


If more solar developers had the wit to negotiate partnership agreements with the owners of parking lots, almost all such opposition would disappear overnight. Everybody who parks likes being able to do so in the shade.

I'm all for covering over parking lots since they are otherwise wasted space ecologically, just like I think rooftop solar is great and should be mandated. But it would take an awful lot of parking lots (each with its own ancillary support infrastructure like substations and so on) to make up for even one utility-scale solar farm on thousands of acres. Both should be happening, much faster than they are currently.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:05 AM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


Metafilter: an endless stream of Pop'n'fresh / Little Debbie porn for everyone's enjoyment and education
posted by some loser at 8:08 AM on January 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


I have effectively unmetered electricity at home right now (ironically because my power infrastructure is shitty, rather than awesome), and I don't use it for bitcoin mining or powering obsolete hardware, because that is wasteful.

But with super cheap electricity, inefficient uses will proliferate. I guess it's possible that global energy use will be so dominated by desalinization and carbon capture that shit like computing really will be an ignorable, minor contribution?

Maybe I have a weird perspective because I work in electronic design and computing. I like having a strong focus on power efficiency. It has forced the tech to get better, as opposed to just bigger and hotter. If electricity was really free, then the design priorities change a lot for non-portable devices, maybe in bad ways.
posted by ryanrs at 8:09 AM on January 11, 2023


See also "If Books Could Kill"'s critique of Paul Ehrlich's infamous book The Population Bomb. I think it's a good explanation of why so many self-identified progressives end up betraying eco-fascist sympathies in, for example, city planning meetings and the NY Times comment section.
posted by en forme de poire at 8:11 AM on January 11, 2023 [8 favorites]


am I supposed to laugh or cry?
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 8:15 AM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


The use of GM, Ford, and Google in the same sentence in an uncritically positive context is reason enough to look very hard at what’s being promoted here, who’s being exploited, and who will gain the most from it.
posted by toodleydoodley at 8:28 AM on January 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


The thinking that simply replacing "dirty" energy with "clean" energy will save us, is just more of the same grow, consume, repeat mentality that has gotten us to this point.

Replacing the de-sequestering of fossil carbon with systems that require no such activity will save us from a great deal of otherwise unavoidable climate change.

What it won't fix is the ongoing mass extinction. We need to drop our collective birth rate quite substantially, and adapt all our societies to the resulting demographic shifts, to make a worthwhile difference there. Because the basic issue underlying this extinction is that there are too many of us using up too much stuff too fast and taking up too much space.

Just because the population bomb is going off in a protracted fizzle instead of a massive bang doesn't mean it's not real. And just being able to see that the population bomb is real doesn't make me an eco-fascist. I would much rather see birth rates decline as a result of general awareness that three billion people take much less feeding and housing than eight, and that less manspreading leaves the entire planet better off including us. Trying to do it via oppressive top-down population controls is only ever going to make everything worse.

And I agree that the dedication with which we're all encouraged to perpetuate the same old grow, consume, repeat mentality is an active impediment to that general awareness.
posted by flabdablet at 8:32 AM on January 11, 2023 [6 favorites]


that shit like computing really will be an ignorable, minor contribution?

My suspicion, based on absolutely nothing at all, is that electrical usage is more likely to be a situation where the power is effectively free, until suddenly it is very much NOT.

...so stay below a certain level and pay nothing or nearly-nothing (grid interconnect fees or whatever). Bump over that limit and you start to pay unless you're prepared to pay in a different way (by slapping more panels on your roof and installing more batteries).
posted by aramaic at 8:33 AM on January 11, 2023



Fuck "Carbon Capture." That is just Clean Coal, take 2. In some cases, carbon capture companies are the exact same companies as the Clean Coal companies from 10 years ago.

DOE spent Millions on engineering injection Wells for Clean Coal and it was a failure, it's so frustrating that people have forgotten absolute engineering failures from 10 years ago

Joe Manchin was the reason Clean Coal was in the ira bill

In 2023, it looks like the entire United States is trying to make a bunch of carbon injection wells in Louisiana,, which is not exactly known for being the most geologically stable place,, or a place without industrial accidents.

Demonstrations against carbon capture injection Wells in Louisiana swamps have been met with armed guards.

So good luck with all that
posted by eustatic at 8:58 AM on January 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


it would take an awful lot of parking lots (each with its own ancillary support infrastructure like substations and so on) to make up for even one utility-scale solar farm on thousands of acres.

The point is exactly that an awful lot of parking lots exist, and that a typical parking lot is bigger enough than a typical rooftop that the economies of scale to be had by going bigger still are already headed firmly into diminishing returns territory.

Your typical parking lot is also a lot closer, physically, to the consumers of the electricity it would generate than your typical greenfield solar farm site, and is likely at any given hour of the day to be well populated by high-capacity batteries on wheels. The amount of grid interconnect infrastructure actually required might well end up being rather lower than a first glance would suggest, especially when compared to whole new transmission lines required by almost all greenfield solar farms.

Massive centralized installations also inherently risk operational failures far more consequential than those of more numerous medium-scale installations would be. And it's not like the panels care much where you put them.

Wind farms strike me as rather more agriculture-compatible than solar farms because the tower footprints are relatively small and widely spaced. But if we must put PV panels on farm land, could we at least raise them high enough and space them carefully enough to allow some kind of agriculture to keep on happening underneath? I can easily imagine that integrating solar PV, rainwater collection and storage, and shade management into a farming system might well allow high-value agriculture to be done regeneratively in places whose climate would otherwise not permit it.
posted by flabdablet at 9:05 AM on January 11, 2023 [6 favorites]


it would take an awful lot of parking lots (each with its own ancillary support infrastructure like substations and so on) to make up for even one utility-scale solar farm on thousands of acres.

I think one of the things that are hard to figure out for governments and energy providers is that we have to stop thinking "utility-scale plants" based on one source of energy and start thinking different distributed sources on a grid.
Above I mentioned our local plant, Amager Bakke. Because design and construction of power plants take so long, by the time it opened, both recycling practices and energy efficiency in new builds had developed enough for the plant to be wildly over-dimensioned. In other words: people in Copenhagen recycle too much and don't use enough energy. But you can still ski on it. And a lot of useful R&D was achieved in the proces of designing constructing it.

At about the same time, the same energy company developed a plan for a distributed system based entirely on renewables. This was stopped for relatively obscure reasons, but I'm thinking the fossil fuel lobbies had a bit of influence there. If it had happened, not only Copenhagen but the entire world would have been far ahead when it comes to CO2 emissions, because anyone would have been able to copy the system and adapt it to their own conditions. The calculation in that project was that energy would be free when the investment was payed down.
posted by mumimor at 9:25 AM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


Birth rates drop when women have education, opportunities, and access to contraception. To the point that alarmist stories about Not Enough Babies are common in developed countries. A lot of the rise in population is also because people live longer now. The obvious answer of allowing more immigration to provide needed workers isn't followed because of nationalism and racism.

There is no population bomb, but there is a lot of sexism and racism intertwined with discussions about who gets to reproduce, and it inevitably ends with the oppression and control of women. We won't get to a sustainable society by that road. Because oddly enough, people resist giving up control of their own bodies.
posted by emjaybee at 9:34 AM on January 11, 2023 [23 favorites]


alarmist stories about Not Enough Babies are common in developed countries

Pretty much all of that alarmism comes from people who also argue vociferously that open borders are a horrible thing that must under no circumstances ever be allowed to happen because they will result in Our Country and Our Culture and Our Way Of Life being "swarmed" or "swamped" by "hordes" of shifty foreigners.

people resist giving up control of their own bodies.

As well they should. My own choice to get sterilized instead of reproducing was absolutely an expression of the control I have over my own body, made feasible by the pleasant living conditions in the country I was lucky enough to have been born in (at a time, incidentally, when the global population was only three billion).

I would love to see everybody get the same opportunity to exercise the same degree of informed choice regardless of where in the world they got their start.

If there were a global Schengen Area so that anybody could just migrate wherever they liked whenever they wanted to, then more people would move to places where living conditions were better, the global birth rate would come down as a consequence, and everybody would end up better off. This seems obvious to me. The ongoing prevalence of the *ist horseshit that stops it being obvious to everybody else as well just makes me sad.
posted by flabdablet at 10:05 AM on January 11, 2023 [10 favorites]


As someone living in a state with substations getting shot at, I'd have to agree that governments need to turn away from thinking about utility scale plants. I'd really like to be where some users in this thread are; paying near zero, or selling power back, generating the electricity for their home on the roof. At my latitude it takes a pretty efficient house, but I don't even have a house so...
posted by shenkerism at 10:24 AM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


Here's another angle to look at this 'increased efficiency allows for increased capability without using more energy':

I work in the telecom industry. The energy number that is often used is 'Watts per bit'--how much power it costs to transfer a bit of information. Even though our data rates are increasing quite a bit, our cost in power per bit is decreasing just as much.

An example: At one time people used 300 baud modems (anyone else here old enough to have used these)? That is 300 bits per second. And now I have a 1 Gigabit per second internet connection. That's 3 million times faster! And yet the total power is only a little higher than the 300 baud modem--at both ends (at your house and at the telecom office). So I can do 3D virtual reality simulations over the network using about the same power as something that used to not even keep up with my typing.
posted by eye of newt at 12:22 PM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


The point is exactly that an awful lot of parking lots exist, and that a typical parking lot is bigger enough than a typical rooftop that the economies of scale to be had by going bigger still are already headed firmly into diminishing returns territory.

There are solar developers for whom this is their primary business model, just like there are developers who primarily do community solar. It's a different business model than putting in solar farms out in the country, since you have to navigate all the issues of leases, permits, infill development, tax subsidies, and so on separately for each small project as well as needing to access different types of equipment that can work efficiently in that setting; power selling agreements have to be negotiated; and so on.

As to economies of scale, we're going to have to disagree about that. There are massive economies of scale by installing a contiguous utility-scale solar farm near an existing interconnection point, versus the site-specific construction, installation, and maintenance of individual parking lot-scale installations (many of which are going to turn out to be on complex sites with, say, histories of contamination). Plus there are huge efficiencies in permitting 200 MW in one go, versus separately permitting 40 5-MW sites. In countries with complex environmental and land use regimes, this is a significant cost and critical path item for schedules.

Like I said above, we need both. We have untold acres of useless parking lots that turn into heat islands in the summer and produce toxic stormwater flows -- they should all (or to the extent possible) be improved with solar arrays and low impact stormwater treatments. But we also need utility-scale developments because we have a lot of non-renewable power generation to replace and make redundant.
posted by Dip Flash at 12:28 PM on January 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


At some point we'll have to build gigantic infrared lasers to gather surplus heat from our profligate energy consumption and beam it somewhere (back into the sun?) or the planet will heat up no matter what. About 1/3 of sunlight hitting the planet is reflected back into space. We can't reduce that number much without having to deal with the effects of all the waste heat from energy use.

A problem for 2100 though. Let's get the excess carbon out of the atmosphere first.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:38 PM on January 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


From MIT Technology Review:
On a recent cool, sunny morning, Meg Caley could be found at Jack’s Solar Garden showing visitors a bed of kale plants. As executive director of Sprout City Farms, Caley has more than a decade of experience farming in unlikely urban spaces in the Denver area. Today, about an hour north of the city, she works alongside researchers on an experimental agricultural method called agrivoltaics.

Agrivoltaics is pretty low-tech. Instead of being placed 18 to 36 inches off the ground, as in traditional solar farms, the solar panels are raised significantly higher to accommodate grazing animals and to allow more sunlight to reach plants growing beneath them.

posted by Bella Donna at 12:45 PM on January 11, 2023 [3 favorites]


Hmm. I never really thought about this before, but plants are not actually happy about the amount of direct sunlight they get in a wide open field. A lot of biochemistry goes into protecting a plant from the harmful effect of UV radiation*. In principle you could design photovoltaics that absorb the UV, get the bulk of the energy you'd get anyway, and scatter the the other wavelengths. Put it above crops and you improve your crop yield.

This is the sort of SF idea that is likely totally irrelevant in economic terms because we have so much sunlight we really don't need to build complex raised structures over cropland. But if you like thought experiments that's one.

*I once assumed that plants that evolved to live in shade had evolved to absorbed more light, which is sort of true in terms of broader leaves. But in fact the real savings is they cut out those protective mechanisms. I learned how dramatic this could be when I put a calathea houseplant outside in direct summer sunlight for an afternoon while doing some housework. It never recovered. :(
posted by mark k at 1:20 PM on January 11, 2023 [5 favorites]


I never really thought about this before, but plants are not actually happy about the amount of direct sunlight they get in a wide open field.

It actually depends on the plant. Some plants love direct sunlight, some hate it, others are in the middle, but generally a full sun plant requires 8 hours of direct sunlight, and there are far more full sun plants than full shade plants.

Stock animals are actually pretty destructive, so keeping them from damaging equipment beneath solar arrays would definitely need to be taken into account.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:04 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


If you read the article, it turns out that shade tends to be good for farmworkers. So with the right plants, this might work really well.
posted by Bella Donna at 2:07 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


From the first link about making energy too cheap to meter (defined as a flat fee):

That energy needs to be generated in ways that don’t re-create the problems it’s solving, but that is entirely within our grasp.

Within our grasp, which is kicking the can down the road after promising rampant consumerism. And this talk of utopia is interesting, because a gadget-filled world also promises a dystopia, such as more garbage, and robots replacing human labor, perhaps even exterminating us too. There is no easy substitute for restraint and moderation in a fragile ecosystem.
posted by Brian B. at 2:27 PM on January 11, 2023 [1 favorite]


About 1/3 of sunlight hitting the planet is reflected back into space. We can't reduce that number much without having to deal with the effects of all the waste heat from energy use.

The thing about radiant energy is that if it's not reflected then it will end up degrading into heat regardless of whether we manage to extract some useful work from it along the way. Whether that heat is made right at the point of absorption, or whether it manifests as waste heat distributed more widely, makes no difference at all to the total amount of it. So the only thing that matters for this kind of analysis is overall planetary albedo i.e. the proportion of radiant energy that the surface reflects rather than absorbs.

There are things we're currently doing to the planet's albedo that are far more consequential than what could happen to the minuscule fraction of Earth's surface we'd need to cover in PV panels in order to supply all our energy needs that way.

It's not even a given that installing a PV panel decreases albedo even locally. Every PV panel we use to shade a paved parking lot or fashionable charcoal-grey roof will decrease rather than increase the amount of heat we've chosen to have the planet absorb from the sun.

The same logic applies to wind, hydro, tidal, biomass and perhaps even geothermal energy sources. All of these existing on-planet energy flows are just complicated ways for the planetary surface to heat itself up, which it's been using them to do for literally billions of years. Tapping into any or all of them to satisfy our own energy requirements cannot increase the amount of heat they make, only move it around.

The logic does not apply to energy sources based on the transformation of otherwise inaccessible fuels like coal, oil, methane, uranium, deuterium and tritium. If the fusion-heads get their way, and convince us all that their insanely complicated and monstrously expensive reactors are where we should be getting our energy from, then we will indeed be building ourselves a genuine excess heat problem for future generations to deal with.
posted by flabdablet at 9:13 PM on January 11, 2023 [5 favorites]


America's Homes Are Already Transforming Into Mini Power Plants [ungated] - "Homes equipped with solar panels are starting to sell their surplus electricity to local utilities. Plus, EVs with bidirectional capability can keep the lights on through blackouts and power outages."
In a middle-class exurb outside Los Angeles, for instance, every one of 219 new single-family homes being built produces and banks solar electricity. Together they also form two microgrids that can operate independently of California’s stressed power grid. KB Home’s Durango and Oak Shade neighborhoods—in Menifee, California—also share a 2.3-megawatt-hour “community battery” that supplies additional juice to homes during outages.

While residents are at work or asleep, a software program engages in energy arbitrage, selling a home’s excess solar electricity to utility Southern California Edison or storing it in the battery in the garage for use in the evening when power rates rise. To maximize electricity production, a heat pump water heater may be put into economy mode when it’s not needed, and charging an electric car can be delayed. The microgrids operate as virtual power plants, allowing the utility to avoid blackouts by tapping hundreds of batteries when demand spikes, such as when a heat wave hits.

Expect virtual power plants to proliferate as grids continue to buckle under extreme weather. In this model, a home battery will become as essential as a water heater. Also compelling the decarbonization of the suburban homestead: state renewable energy mandates and the rising costs of electricity and gas.

The growth in energy-independent homes will be supercharged by the federal Inflation Reduction Act’s generous subsidies. A tax credit that covers 30% of a rooftop solar system’s cost has been extended to January 2034, and home batteries now qualify for the incentive as well.

The IRA provides $14,000 in rebates per family to replace fossil fuel furnaces and water heaters with heat pumps, install induction stoves and upgrade a home’s electrical system. Households that earn up to 150% of their area’s median income are eligible for the rebates. Homeowners who don’t qualify can still get as much as $3,200 in tax credits for installing heat pumps or induction stoves and making other energy-efficiency improvements. Some states and utilities give their own rebates.
posted by kliuless at 9:41 PM on January 11, 2023 [5 favorites]


@WSJ: "South Korea's Hanwha Group plans to spend $2.5 billion to build a solar-manufacturing supply chain in Georgia, spurred by massive U.S. tax incentives."

@bluestein: "It's confirmed: Federal and state officials say the Georgia expansion is the largest-ever investment in clean energy manufacturing in U.S. history."

> Within our grasp, which is kicking the can down the road after promising rampant consumerism. And this talk of utopia is interesting, because a gadget-filled world also promises a dystopia, such as more garbage, and robots replacing human labor, perhaps even exterminating us too. There is no easy substitute for restraint and moderation in a fragile ecosystem.

@pkedrosky@sportsmedtwtr.net: "I find 'Make Energy Too Cheap To Meter' blather mostly psychologically fascinating, with a toddler-like unwillingness to accept limits on 'fun' and growth. It almost never thinks through second- and third-order effects, or unintended consequences."

also btw...
@pkedrosky@sportsmedtwtr.net: "A clip from an interview with one of the original SimCity designers, on how the game would have fallen apart if parking lots in the game were their actual sizes in modern cities."
posted by kliuless at 11:32 PM on January 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


Having cheap, reliable non-polluting energy is a necessary precursor to many utopian designs though - it doesn't have to be about unlimited consumerism and growth.

Easy, cheap fresh water through desalination would be an absolute game changer for water shortages given population density on coasts, and allow easier migration and mitigation on agriculture as we pay the toll of our baked-in climate heating from already emitted CO2, as well as easing the ongoing world food distribution crisis.

Right now in my home, the UK, people are literally choosing between heating and eating - they cannot afford to turn the lights or heating on because they're on a pre-pay meter and prices have tripled in a year. The disabled and vulnerable can't be cut-off from a normal contract, but if the energy company gets a court order to force entry and fit a pre-pay due to debt, then they end up self-disconnecting and that's all fine and legal *spit*. It's only because it's been a mild winter so far we haven't seen a big spike in people freezing to death. Businesses too are paying eyewatering sums for energy, and it's cramping wages and causing massive inflation; the government support for bills, such as it is, is running up huge public debts. Mostly all down to the international price of natural gas due to scarcity, with the ending of most Russian gas exports west, and the profiteering of energy extractors. Cheap and abundant green energy would make a hell of a difference to the majority of people's quality of life right now.

it's estimated around 30,000 people die each year in the UK as a result of air pollution - increased lung cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and lesser but still serious impacts such as increased asthma. A lot of that pollution comes from petrol/diesel transport emissions right where people live and work, especially dense urban areas. Electric cars don't solve all of that - tyre dust, etc - but they do reduce it massively. And cheap energy makes it easier to do high quality public transport too.

Carbon capture, while often the fantasy approach to allow us to carry on burning fossil fuels instead *could* be used to shorten the misery and likely mass migration crises by taking out some of what we've already emitted. Much easier with clean, cheap energy.

The list goes on and on. Massive growth in impacts on ecosystems in other ways is obviously a potential consequence, such as resource extraction, waste, habitat destruction etc. These issues already exist currently, and it takes political will to protect those other natural ecosystems and places and people, whether we have abundant green energy or not. Which is why we need responsible and capable governments that also look to the medium and long term public benefit, but then we need that to get to clean energy in the first place...
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 7:44 AM on January 12, 2023 [5 favorites]


Fantasies of unlimited energy annoy are just that because no one considers what happens to the energy after you use it. It becomes entropy. Call me when you have an unlimited way to dispose of entropy. Then I'm interested.
posted by hypnogogue at 8:02 AM on January 14, 2023 [3 favorites]


Utopia is subjective, unlikely it can be designed or delivered by democratic means. Democracy assumes a degree of fairness, and the freedom to learn, say and do something to maintain fairness on a daily basis. Patents will lord over us in any techo-utopia, and even if we make the patent laws go away, then we have issues with unlimited extraction of resources that require energy, and pollution of everything by toxins, light and sound. The idea of utopia usually excludes the world becoming mostly a waste pit too. Something is always metered by society in order to keep overlords at bay, might as well be energy as their source of income, on a fair basis.
posted by Brian B. at 9:17 AM on January 14, 2023


Fantasies of unlimited energy annoy are just that because no one considers what happens to the energy after you use it. It becomes entropy. Call me when you have an unlimited way to dispose of entropy. Then I'm interested.

Incoming solar energy arriving onto the surface of the earth turns to entropy one way or another, whether or not they are absorbed by a solar panel and made to do useful work...
posted by xdvesper at 2:54 PM on January 15, 2023 [3 favorites]


Something that is slowing (though not stopping) the shift to renewables in the US and some other places is local opposition from people living close to where the wind or solar farms would be located.

This is true. Joe Manchin is not a popular guy around these parts, with good reason, but his permitting reform proposal would help tremendously in unleashing more renewable energy development, as well as development of the high-voltage transmissions lines needed to move that energy around. But a lot of folks on the left view the proposal as a giveaway to the fossil fuel industry, especially because Manchin's the one putting it forward.

Ultimately, making it slightly easier to build, say, a pipeline, while also making it easier to build already-cheaper-than-ever renewables, is probably a good bet. The more renewable energy that's out there for the taking, the less economically viable fossil fuels become.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 2:48 PM on January 18, 2023


“At a 2.3% [economic] growth rate, [earth's surface] would reach boiling temperature in about 400 years. And this statement is independent of technology. Even if we don’t have a name for the energy source yet, as long as it obeys thermodynamics, we cook ourselves with perpetual energy increase.”Tom Murphy

We need overall much less fossil fuel energy and less travel by cars and planes, less trade, less meat, etc.

Yes, we do need renewables so that some advanced society survives. Yes, private sufficiency and public abundance makes our lives better, whatever the economic setting (example). Yes, abundance via degrowth provides the nicest path.

We need much less though regardless, so if our society obstructs the nicest path then we'll take some other path I guess.
posted by jeffburdges at 9:04 PM on January 24, 2023 [2 favorites]


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