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The Remarkable Progress of Renewable Energy
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bilby
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Expands from what? There currently is no global transmission system; This is just more hypothetical handwavium.
1,000km is about 10% of enough; How do you build the other 90%, while avoiding massive losses?
Map showing current energy infrastructure.
A line through the Aleutians would pretty much make it global.
A line through the Aleutians would pretty much make it global.
bilby
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… but completely incapable of handling the flow of energy needed to achieve, or even come close to, your stated objective.
This is like drawing a map showing all the roads, down to dirt roads and overgrown tracks, and then assuming that you could drive freeway levels of traffic along them all.
Also, most of the grids on that map don’t join up. It’s easy to see a small gap and think it’s trivial to bridge it, but there’s usually a reason why that small gap is there, and ‘small’ is a matter of the scale of your mapping - a thousand ‘small’ hundred mile gaps is a hundred thousand miles of missing grid.
I don’t think you have any grasp of the scale of your proposal, or of the engineering obstacles to its implementation.
It’s easy to come up with hypothetical solutions if you handwave away any obstacles; But you can’t build an actual solution that way.
Is there any scenario in which solving the eco-energy crisis does not involve significant engineering obstacles? Expanding the electrical transmission system doesn't seem overly difficult in comparison with, say, constructing hundreds of nukes or off-worlding to Mars.
skepticalbip
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Why go through all the mining and smelting required to make such a mass of power cables and solar panels needed to even start approaching your dream? Why not just set up fusion power plants in every neighborhood in the world and do away with all the long power transmission lines? .... since we are dreaming.
bilby
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Constructing hundreds of nuclear power plants is something that has actually been done in the real world by real people.
skepticalbip
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And it works. 80% of France's power grid is supplied by nuclear power.
There's the project to transmit electricity from Australia to Singapore, which is interesting but insignificant in the context of a project to power one side of the planet from the other.
Australia-Asia Power Link - Wikipedia
en.m.wikipedia.org
Very cool. Could be a model for trans-oceanic power cables.
Cheerful Charlie
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Hydrogen generation and storage is here already, but it is a niche industry and is expensive. The Biden administration has implemented a program with the goal over 10 years to reduce costs of producing and storing hydrogen by 80%.
bilby
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Goals and plans don’t store electricity.
Cheerful Charlie
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Oh, get real! Plans and goals have been part of America's way since the 30's with projects like Hoover dam, TVA and rural electification. The oil industry was and is heavily subsidized. So was nuclear. This hydrogen program is underway, so sorry about that.
skepticalbip
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But it is important to be able to distinguish the difference between dreams and reasonable plans.
Cheerful Charlie
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Again. Hydrogen generation and storage is here now. It is a niche industry. It needs encouragement to speed thi gs along as a major player.
skepticalbip
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And you really believe that it can replace fossil fuels and/or nuclear power? That is what I mean by dreams vs. reasonable plans. There is absolutely nothing wrong with working on energy storage systems but to dream that they are a panacea is not being rational.
Cheerful Charlie
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Don't put words in my mouth.
skepticalbip
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Then what do you expect the result of reducing the cost of storing hydrogen to be? It will still be fairly expensive as there will still be the cost of generating the hydrogen plus the storage cost plus the transport cost from where it is generated to where it will be used.
Cheerful Charlie
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The results would be to make hydrogen generation on site of solar and wind installations economically feasible, off the shelf, instead of increasingly exspensive lithium batteries. Long term projects. These things exist now. What is needed is economies of scale and standardiztion.
Meanwhile, day dreams of large numbers of small nuclear reactors have a problem. Due to the nature of physics, such mini reactors produce far more high level radioactive waste. So that dream may be just that, a dream.
And in decades to come, fracking will start getting more expensive and gas also as low hanging fruit, easy to develop deposits tap out.
Meanwhile, day dreams of large numbers of small nuclear reactors have a problem. Due to the nature of physics, such mini reactors produce far more high level radioactive waste. So that dream may be just that, a dream.
And in decades to come, fracking will start getting more expensive and gas also as low hanging fruit, easy to develop deposits tap out.