Interesting to see the comment thread digging into all sorts of criticism of the article (is it 2 kWh / fridge? Or 1.1? Should the author discuss renewable earlier or more seriously?)
The main point I got from the article was a helpful reminder that a large part of the world doesn't have basic things that I take for granted (not just refrigeration, but you might also include air conditioning, transportation, etc). And that if we did want the entire world to live a life that includes things like that, we just don't have the energy right now.
EDIT: I kept thinking about this and it doesn't stop at just basics. It's also things like living in a comfortable, well-manufactured home. Being able to buy toys for your kids. Taking airplanes to visit family or to vacation. Enjoying the consumption of meat, or food delicacies. The list goes on as you expand the threshold from basic necessities, to comfort, to luxuries, and you can decide where you want to draw the line.
> Interesting to see the comment thread digging into all sorts of criticism of the article (is it 2 kWh / fridge? Or 1.1? Should the author discuss renewable?)
Hear hear. The point is, for those of us living in developed countries, is that all wealth is energy wealth. The western way of life is totally dependent on an abundance of cheap energy. When energy runs out, or becomes significantly more expensive, it's game over for developed countries. That's why Europeans are currently terrified.
For those wishing to go a bit further than nitpicking the article, look up the following two concepts:
- Peak oil [1]
- Energy returned on energy invested [2]
One thing I’ve learned over time is that it’s just really, really difficult for most people (including me!) to reason about things that they haven’t directly experienced. Even harder to have empathy. So it’s very hard to engage with an argument or discussion that’s about the world as a whole, because all of us have such difficulty properly weighting and evaluating the things we have no experience with (which by definition, for everyone, is most of the world).
The US spends enough energy on transportation that the entire world could have refrigeration.
The US spends 28% of total energy consumption on transportation. 93.33 Quadrillion BTUs x .28 / 3142 (BTUs per kWh) / 365 (days per year) = 22.8B kWh per day.
BEV vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE vehicles.
We could have the same standard of living and just not use gas-powered vehicles and save ~22.8B kWh per day.
If I'm doing my math right, that's more than enough energy for 3B households to have refrigeration.
The problem isn't that we don't have enough energy.
The problem is that most of the world is really poor.
In the simplest of terms - you can't get much cheaper energy at scale than $0.10 per kWh. A lot of households are living on $2 per day. They can maybe afford 5% for refrigeration - but a refrigerator only lasts 7 years or so and costs $200+. That's another $0.08 per day. That's pushing 10% for refrigeration. I don't think they can afford it.
And when you're that poor - you're probably not going to be able to get electricity reliably for $0.10 per kWh...
When you're that poor, $0.18 = close to half the calories you need for the day. I don't think you can just shift that to refrigeration. What are you going to refrigerate anyway?
It's good to remember how starved for resources some places are.
It's bad to take that resource starvation as the only/primary cause of poverty. The example I like using is that the life expectancy in counties in Alabama has been less than that in Bangladesh for a while. Here, individual's lack of access to resources which exist in the area is more the issue.
The most interesting statistic I've heard recently is that the United States uses more energy just for its AC than the entire African continent does for literally everything combined.
Vaclav Smil has written extensively and extremely well about this subject. His latest "How the World Really Works" goes into great detail regarding the importance of energy (and especially fossil fuel) in everything that keeps things going.
A lot of poverty is societal poverty (of order, collaboration, help, education, distribution, and so on) and is worse, even all other things (like relative cost of energy to average salary) being equal.
You can be a slum-living destitute poor in a country even though you have financial access personally to several times the energy expenditure of someone in another country (or area of same country) with a different lifestyle.
Thank you. I was going to make the same post. I'm a huge fan of all of the mod-cons, but for most of human history people lived with pre-industrial-revolution levels of tech.
And we still had rich and poor.
Poverty is when you don't have a good place in society, lack of respect by your fellows, and no security for your physical safety or property.
Yes and no. Given a specific definition of "not impoverished", there is a threshold of energy availability below which energy is fundamentally limiting towards achieving that definition.
Above that though, there are other factors, and IMO, there are only two other fundamental ones: cognition (the capacity/time to perceive and manipulate the world by directing energy towards goals) and social capital (society allowing you to direct energy towards your goals, and/or supporting your goals through application of their energy and cognition).
Yea it looks like most poverty now is political. Like North Korea or war torn countries. I think most countries if they had good political leadership could be wealthy
This article is exceptional. It may be reductive or even wrong but at least it's trying to quantify these issues and it uses actual data. Not only does this allow for analysis, it also makes it, in theory, falsifiable.
If the article is right and all it takes is around a doubling of the current global energy, at 1.1% population growth and a global annual increase in energy usage of 2.5%, this gives around 50 years before we start producing enough energy to push poverty levels below 1%.
The book Windup Girl [0] is a SciFi novel set in a universe where climate change has completely altered the world. Fossil fuels are no longer available, so production is limited by genetically engineered products or human/animal labor to charge in-universe batteries. Calorie cost of items becomes front and center to many activities.
Yes, but more like power than energy. The main problem is that energy can't really be stored, so energy cannot be saved like money can (sort of). So it is really power that money buys, not energy, and only supposing power is available.
This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
So you need energy but also stability. And minimizing corruption helps as well.
Air dropping barrels of oil, or solar panels without regard for social, civil, and technical infrastructure isn't that helpful. But there are a lot of areas that are primed and would benefit from just adding energy.
If a country in a temperate climate has valuble natural resources to drive it's economy and doesn't depend on mass skilled labor then governments that don't care about citizens are more easily established and last longer. The number of interest groups that any leader has to keep satisfied to stay in power is much smaller.
Interesting point. I guess the issue with these countries is that their energy reserves are simply used to enrich the state and a small elite, instead of being shared widely with their citizens.
Quibble with the numbers all you want, but there is a fundamental truth in this visible to anyone who grew up in the third world amidst poverty.
One of the biggest (hidden) revolution in healthcare for poor rural Indian women is availability of LPG cylinders to replace fossil fuels - wood and cow dung - for cooking. Fossil fuels cause lung deaths [1] due to indoor pollution. The green agenda cuts against it.
The biggest enabler to education is electrification. I vividly remember growing up 20 years ago that only the middle class with electrification could afford to compete in schools as you needed to power light bulbs to study at night. No electrification and reliable supply then you cannot study. The situation is worse in villages with no electrification. Forget computers and internet, this is just about having enough to power a 40 W equivalent light bulb to read a book.
Many times, the agenda of the liberal west seems like class warfare against the poor of the third world: "we will not give up our heated/cooled mansions and our SUVs and our extravagant vacations across the globe but will make energy so expensive that you are crowded out of the market". A British business can afford a 20-50% power bill hike or even go out of business, a third world poor citizen is pushed over the edge into grinding poverty.
Here's a more optimistic take especially with regard to solar.
> There’s really no end in sight yet for improvements in solar and batteries. Cost drops are continuing simply from scaling up, and new materials and technologies are on the horizon that could generate continued price declines per unit of energy.
Battery electrochemistry still has headroom, but solar is already approaching the Shockley–Queisser ceiling, which limits efficiency at about 30% for single junction and 50% for multiple junction devices. That's the absolute conversion limit, similar to the Carnot limit for thermal engines.
So if you can buy today cells that are 18-20% efficient, you should not expect dramatic improvements in the next decades, only very gradual. The cost will continue to drop, so given the huge areas available for solar, the potential is still huge.
I hope that the advent of better solar energy extraction and automation (things like Tesla's robot) will usher us into an era of abundance.
Self-sustaining robot factories would give us the means of almost unlimited labor that we could task with building out all the infrastructure we'd need to lift humanity away from the reaches of nature's tyranny.
I love the idea of self-sustaining AI driven automation. But unless the system is capable of 100% recycling, it needs raw materials. Some of those are going to become contested.
> "There's probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda's annual energy usage. That's about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully one-third of Rwanda's current primary energy consumption."
1) Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH/day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half.
2) Energy capture for refrigeration from solar in Rwanda makes much more sense than oil production does. Under full sunlight, a decent 2.5 kW solar array produces about 10 kWH per day (as the full 2.5 KW is only produced at noon, tailing off towards morning and evening). As you probably want to run the refrigerator at night, a battery capable of storing about half that output (5 kWH) would also be needed.
The notion that you'd want to set up an oil-burning power plant (which only converts energy stored in oil to electricity at ~25% efficiency or so) in Rwanda is pretty silly.
As far as claims that there isn't enough land to set up solar panels to provide this minimal home energy supply, the roofs of most dwellings would provide adequate area. It's also possible to grow a wide variety of crops in conjunction with wind turbines and solar panels on agricultural land (wide spacing is all).
I think the point is explained further below - the author is making a reference to the amount of energy required if the world had a developed standard of living, not saying that we would ever use natural gas down there.
> It can be done. In the near term, it is conceivable that already-common sources of renewable energy like wind and solar power can meet most of the need. Things would be easier if existing nuclear power technologies were expanded, or at least if we avoided shutting such plants down prematurely.
> But the more fanciful world described above—the one in which, thanks to plentiful energy, the world has eliminated want—is possible only with continued innovation. In the long term, the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling.
> Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH/day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half.
There's a number of people experimenting with converting chest freezers to chest fridges using an external thermostat. Apparently, these can be extremely efficient - people are reporting 10-20% of your 1.1kwH/day number.
Of course, the typical downsides of a chest freezer apply to a chest fridge - they're typically much more limited in size compared to their upright counterparts due to ergonomics, and the larger they are, the more difficult they are to fully utilize.
I don't think the author suggests to set up an oil-burning power plant, that number is just for visualization. And I guess you could even go without a battery at night by converting the energy from the daylight directly into cold.
For a 2.5 kW solar system would cost somewhere around $2-5K USD and the 5kWH battery would also cost $2-5K USD. I don’t think the average Rwanda citizen has $5-10K available to install just enough power to run their fridge.
You can be poor while easily meeting your energy needs. A classic example is remote rural areas where virtually all inhabitants own some plot of land. Even if they are poor they can feed their fireplace with some wood, for free.
Sure, but your standard of living will be lower. The energy needs he's talking about include all usage, including that which you get from burning wood on your land.
There's nowhere near enough natural wood worldwide to meet our energy consumption
in tech, the ever-increasing availability of computation has widespread effects that haven’t always been easy to predict.
- computation gets used to automate billing in the telecom and finance industries.
- a little bit faster and arcades explode across the globe.
- a little bit faster and CAD transforms how the transportation industry approaches engineering.
- a little bit faster and radio astronomy can correct all the measurement distortions digitally and image everything with greater effective precision.
- a little bit faster and we can simulate more aspects of chemistry or biology and identify beneficial drugs more easily.
energy experiences this same thing: each incremental decrease pushes some latent tech/application past its tipping point and soon enough the landscape looks completely different at $0.10/kWh than at $10.00/kWh. consider in the list above that all the tech advances aren’t just due to the FLOPS of your computing base, but also the cost to operate that computation — which is fundamentally tied to energy prices.
> At its core, however, the math here is very simple. In the US, the average person uses 77,000 kWh per year. The average Finn uses only about 58,000 kWh. The Brits, good global citizens, use only about 30,000 kWh on average.
Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses about 2100kWh annually. This is in my case without gas-powered heating, and external power use (such as personal transportation, or production of bought goods).
I can understand if these more indirect uses of energy are included in the average, however it would be helpful for the discussion if these numbers were explained. It might for instance help to explain how the West can slash it's energy use five fold, as the article suggests.
I think that basically what it's doing is saying "Here's all the energy that Britain consumes, divided by their total population". So sure, your electricity might only be 2100kWh, but did the government resurface a road nearby? Did you think about the fuel burned to transport the food you bought in the supermarket etc.
The average US house is multiple times the area of UK house, so that makes a big difference. https://homescopes.com/average-home-size/ Add car sizes, public transport, less manufacturing.
Finland seems high in those numbers though, maybe because its all cold?
It's hard to tell from the link, but this seems to be comparing the US' electricity consumption to the UK's electricity consumption. Most of the UK's energy use is from burning fuel for heat. Using energy and electricity as interchangeable is very confusing. That said, I would assume if you included all energy usage the US would still be a lot more because we drive so much more.
In order to build systems to extract and use energy requires an educated society - that is the root deficiency. And it’s a lot more than just dropping books from airplanes.
If you have energy, you have refrigeration. You have the manufacturing properties to produce the things necessary for children to focus on education. You have the agricultural properties to increase yield and reduce the number of people needed for the agricultural sector, making education more valuable.
In the present day, yes, that's true. However, once we develop AGI, this deficiency could* go away permanently.
An "educated society" just means a "necessary amount of trained cognitive power to direct energy towards the goals/purposes we value". Currently that's exclusive domain of the human brains within our workforce. However, there is absolutely no fundamental requirement for the cognitive power to be human. Once AGI is achieved, artificial constructs could rapidly (no 20-30 year training cost per single unit!) take over the vast majority of cognitive burden from humans.
I personally believe that we will achieve AGI on a timescale far far shorter than any kind of mass attempt to improve education across the world.
*Whether AGI is used to usher in a utopic civilization, or one of many possible dystopias, will of course depend on what groups end up being in control of it.
> In order to hit the 2050 target, we therefore need to be using about 1500 TWh per year — 1% of current global energy consumption.
It's infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet.
It's even more infuriating now that I've read H.G. Well's "The World Set Free.", which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy take on current day energy politics.
The problems it focuses on haven't been addressed, and we're living the worst case scenario the book posits. (The better case scenario the book focuses on is a global collapse of government due to full scale nuclear war in the early days of atomic weaponry.)
Not that story telling is the ultimate solution, but I share the frustration. So many of these old stories are essentially coming true, and there's not much discussion on it by most people.
That said, we have some very good cautionary tales like black mirror that make people think, but those are very few. In fact, most stories in this genre start with "in an apocalyptic world where people X, Y happens".
It would be nice to see some modern black-mirror quality adaptations of ideas by H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and even authors like Mark Twain would be great.
Nuclear Winter can stop Global Warming with room to spare, so, maybe, Russians do the right thing when they are shelling Ukrainian nuclear power plant. Maybe, Ukrainian just need to return the fire.
No, all poverty is organizational, one can have plenty of access or energy without the capacity to deploy it in a way that alleviates poverty or solves a problem, and the other way around plenty of technologies exist that utilize very little energy to great effect. The Soviet Union was for a long time the second largest consumer and biggest producer of energy in the world, but its society was characterized by low efficiency and relatively little output per unit of energy consumed.
Your supercomputer from the 80s ate a lot of energy but didn't necessarily do a lot of work, economic or otherwise. Almost all devices we use now are less energy hungry but more useful than they were decades ago. They've gotten better not through energy consumption but better design.
In the same sense refrigeration or artificial cooling isn't necessarily the only way to deal with heat. One could think of lifestyles, food choices, technologies, or supply chains that are optimized for a particular region that reduce the amount of storage required, or a city designed around maximizing architecture and shade to cool with less need for AC, and so on. The Artic Apple is genetically engineered to not brown, eliminating food waste not by energy consumption but genetic engineering.
There should be more work on flexible solutions tailored to individual communities rather than trying to push the 20th century industrial solutions on places which largely cannot support or maintain them.
I would claim that poverty also comes from impoverished ecosystems, and lack of civil rights, so it's really wealth = access to energy + clean environment + civil rights
> the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling. Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland. There are only so many places you can put a windmill, and only so many rivers to dam.
Is this true? I have never seen this argument against renewables, is there any math? I can't imagine running out of space, with panels on roofs and windmills between fields.
One thing I find troubling about environmentalism is that the tendency to try to make everything more energy efficient/ optimized for the environment risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater in a few ways:
-More expensive energy directly leads to less energy-intensive activity, and a lot of this energy-intensive activity is the sort of activity that helps human flourishing.
-A tendency to regulate activity such that the most energy-optimized activity is the only allowable/ affordable activity.
-Regulating away the ability to do things, especially things that have questionable externalities and the regulators don't see the immediate value of. Is it really a good thing that the Netherlands is destroying the livelihoods of farmers to protect natural areas from Nitrogen emissions? Who quantified the harm associated with the nitrogen emissions? How does this harm food security in the Netherlands? How does this fare in relation to the fact that energy independence and food independence go hand-in-hand, at a time when there is a global fertilizer shortage and a European energy shortage? Seems short-sighted to me.
Regulation is short-sighted? You say this in a world that's burning up because no one imposed on emitters the cost of the externalities of those emissions... Now that is short-sighted.
I would say energy doesn’t just appear itself, it comes from good infrastructure+support, which comes from a well planning from the government, which also require the govt to be competent, which require a well govt structure. Therefore the energy correlation is there but not a causation.
"Every time money changes hands, GDP goes up. And every time money changes hands, that's usually becomes someone is doing something. As we've seen, that takes energy. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that GDP and energy are highly correlated."
Which is where economics goes wrong. The working units are incorrect.
You'll note that economics likes to use currency as its working denomination, when the actual underlying denominations are kWh and the labour hour.
Nearly all the failures of macroeconomics can be laid at the belief that there is a one-to-one correlation between moving money around and doing stuff. There isn't and that's the problem.
The issue is similar to electrical engineers assuming that true power and apparent power are always the same.
You are giving way too much credit to moving money = doing stuff as the cause of failure of macro economics. There's so much wrong with macro. Check out Steve Keens' The New Econmics: A manifesto for some of the major things wrong with macro.
I just sat through a talk at Worldcon by Henry Spencer that addressed some of these issues. He presented the case that to provide the energy we need to address future needs, including raising the standard of living in Third World countries, we’ll need space based solar power.
One of the most insightful quotes I ever found of HN:
«The limiting factor for [civilizations] is collective intelligence, not energy.
We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.»
I'm not sure "collective intelligence" gives the right feel. We have the intelligence, we're just organised by a few people who have power directing labour towards making those few people even more insanely rich, whilst many people continue without direction and a larger few attempt to direct resources towards the benefit of the majority.
Maybe intelligence is about organisation (of neurons) but still, organisation towards a common goal that isn't further enrichment of the most insanely greedy seems like our major problem on a species level.
There seems to be a choice between artificially holding back energy generation due to net zero concerns keeping more people in poverty for longer, or we could pursue fossil fuels and nuclear and lift more people out of poverty now (and presumably hope for a future fix/mitigation for climate impacts).
I wonder which would save most lives overall? I would also note that those living in poverty currently don't seem to have a vote on the approach to take.
Per the article, this is a false dichotomy. If we increase energy production by 1%, and use it for carbon capture, then we will have a carbon negative economy.
(As someone who doesn't agree with the article's conclusions), someone living in poverty does not have the resources to address intellectual and emotional poverty. If you can't afford to own or run a refrigerator, do you really have the time to (for example) tutor your kids outside of school hours, see a therapist, spend time relaxing on the weekends and in the evenings? No. You're probably working three jobs.
I assumed they were just going to ignore renewables, since the kind of person who writes these things generally does.
But instead they weirdly skipped over it and started fantasizing about some new technology that doesn't exist yet.
What happened to energy poverty being important? "The current cheapest, cleanest, safest sources of energy in history aren't green enough for me" was not an ending I expected.
Is this intentional pro-fossil fuels propaganda, written with full self-knowledge of that fact, or are they just so wrapped up in lies that they think this weird rant somehow reflects reality and is helpful to society?
I genuinely don't get it.
Is it possible to write that many words on a topic and intentionally get "primary energy" wrong and believe that it reflects the actual useful economic work done? They mention nuclear a couple of times, so surely they're aware that nuclear can generate both heat and electricity and it's the electricity that's most helpful?
> In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is around 8% smaller than today,
but it serves an economy more than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more
people. More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and behavioural changes combine
to offset increases in demand for energy services as the world economy grows and access
to energy is extended to all.
> Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely on renewable energy. Two-thirds
of total energy supply in 2050 is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy.
Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of energy supplies. Solar PV
capacity increases 20-fold between now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold.
> Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four-fifths of
total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050
are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities
fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce.
> Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy consumption in 2050. It plays a key
role across all sectors – from transport and buildings to industry – and is essential to produce
low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this, total electricity generation increases
over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional new final
investment decisions should be taken for new unabated coal plants, the least efficient coal
plants are phased out by 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are retrofitted.
> By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and
solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
The article has a fair dose of paternalistic exceptionalism regarding countries in Africa. Rwanda is not what people think it is, there is much to learn from how things are being done in Rwanda, however, they don't think they need their colonial masters to rule them any more. Hence, unless you seek out first hand accounts or visit the place, you would never know how wonderful the place is.
Nigeria still has the colonial yoke and problems of corruption, corruption and more corruption. Which is necessary for resource extraction, which serves to keep the country in poverty.
The World Bank/IMF and other big organisations have had the best part of a century to lift afflicted African nations out of poverty but they saddled them with debt instead.
The only people serious about alleviating poverty are the Chinese. They believe in peace and prosperity and we call them Communist. China has taken hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. We have got the numbers and those numbers are a good basis for how much energy the world needs.
Personally I think this topic is best understood with a petri dish and a bloom of mould. We are that mould and when the energy supply is exhausted our presence on the petri dish diminishes.
Telephony is one of the analogies. Many developing countries' rural villages could simply leapfrog the landline telephone technology and move directly to cell phones.
Computers - instead of desktops, straight to smart phones and tablets.
Banking - instead of a lot of bank branch offices and having to travel and queue, straight to online banking (and even being very advanced compared to many western countries).
It could be so with refrigeration. Solar power is potentially a really good fit for that.
Maybe electric scooters will do a lot for mobility at some point and people can skip the whole car thing.
> Every square meter of land with a solar panel on it is a spot that can't be agriculture, housing, forest, or wetland.
This is my main problem with it. I'm concerned that the environmental damage from these energy sources is worse than that from less dirty fossil fuel sources like natural gas.
Energy is not sufficient to do stuff. You still need a thing to convert that energy into something useful, and those things cost money as well. Taking refrigeration as an example; using my local home improvement store as an example (which isn't the most representative for the costs applicable to national development, but should be good enough for napkin math):
A refrigerator/freezer running at 1.17 KwH/day goes for about $800 USD. [0]
For $100 USD, I can get a solar panel that claims about 300 Wh/day[1]
This puts the cost of energy at about the same as the cost of making the energy useful. Obviously Rwanda isn't going to buy retail from Home Depot. Further, I suspect that when done at scale, you will find that the discount you see over retail for energy is more significant than the discount you see for refrigerators.
Granted, making the refrigerator requires energy. However, it also requires a factory and components. Making those requires energy, but also other factories and components.
Looking at how this plays out in a developed country. In the US 2021, the electricity industry had a revenue of about $430 Billion [2], for an economy with a GDP of about 23 Trillion [3]. In total, energy accounts for about 5% of GDP. [4]
Running that $800 USD refrigerator I mentions above would cost me about $0.08 USD/day
Sure, doing stuff requires energy, and we need to prepare for the energy demands of developing nations to increase. However, the cost of energy is a small fraction of the cost of most of the stuff you want to do with the energy. Sure, if energy was orders of magnitude cheaper, then that may enable more usages of energy, but even those things would require investment beyond energy generation to do.
You ignored inverter, battery, battery replacement, and installation costs. All that has to be amortized along with the interest rate or opportunity cost of tying up your capital.
There a lot of refrigerators cheaper than $800 and just about all of them cost more to power than to buy.
Good point, so you buy 4 panels for $400 USD. Next what do you need: wiring, mounting, inverter, storage - I'd like to set up a fridge at the camp, any idea the price on everything I would need?
Also even here and Europe when price of energy goes up poor people swich to burning wood or coal.
This is bad for enviroment and the air qualit in their house causing disease.
Alot of the policy decisions are made by people least affected by them. This also explains rise of Trump and populisim.
Here in Canada, in our 5 party system, Trudue was voted in by the margin of office workers in Toronto.
And proceeded locked down hard, responding to their hypochondriac fears. Their suffering of laptop work from home and food delivert to their door was so bad that many wanted to extend the lockdowns indefinetly.
> The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s.[1] The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.
> Talk of economic and population growth leading to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity for humans are popular in environmentalism.[16] The potential limiting factor for the human population might include water availability, energy availability, renewable resources, non-renewable resources, heat removal, photosynthetic capacity, and land availability for food production.[17] The applicability of carrying capacity as a measurement of the Earth's limits in terms of the human population has not been very useful, as the Verhulst equation does not allow an unequivocal calculation and prediction of the upper limits of population growth.[16]
> [...] The application of the concept of carrying capacity for the human population, which exists in a non-equilibrium, is criticized for not successfully being able to model the processes between humans and the environment.[16][20] In popular discourse the concept has largely left the domain of academic consideration, and is simply used vaguely in the sense of a "balance between nature and human populations".[20]
Practically, if you can find something sustainable to do with brine (NaCL; Sodium Chloride and), and we manage to achieve cheap clean energy, and we can automate humanoid labor, desalinating water and pumping it inland is feasible; so, global water prices shouldn't then be the limit to our carrying capacity. #Goal6 #CleanWater
TIL about modern methods for drilling water wells on youtube: with a hand drill, with a drive cap and a sledgehammer and a pitcher-pump after a T with valves for an optional (loud) electric pump, or a solar electric water pump
> Nearly 4.2 billion people worldwide had access to tap water, while another 2.4 billion had access to wells or public taps.[3] The World Health Organization considers access to safe drinking-water a basic human right.
> About 1 to 2 billion people lack safe drinking water.[4] Water can carry vectors of disease. More people die from unsafe water than from war, then-U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in 2010.[5] Third world countries are most affected by lack of water, flooding, and water quality. Up to 80 percent of illnesses in developing countries are the direct result of inadequate water and sanitation. [6]
A helpful risk hierarchy chart:
"The risk hierarchy for water sources used in private drinking water supplies": From Lowest Risk to Highest Risk: Mains water, Rainwater, Deep groundwater, Shallow groundwater, Surface water
TIL it's possible to filter Rainwater with an unglazed terracotta pot and no electricity, too
Also, TIL about solid-state heat engines ("thermionic converters") with no moving parts, that only need a thermal gradient in order to generate electricity. The difference between #VantaBlack and #VantaWhite in the sun results in a thermal gradient, for example
Is a second loop and a heat exchange even necessary if solid-state heat engines are more efficient than gas turbines?
Any exothermic reaction?! FWIU, we only need 100°C to quickly purify water.
I think this article assumes that all people want the same things out of life, such as comfort and refrigeration, but this is not the case with "everyone".
If we had energy cheap enough for every human to live at the highest current levels of consumption, wouldn’t we have to do something with the waste heat? Radiator fins on space elevators? Or can we send it out into space from the ground?
All renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, biofuels) comes from the sun anyway and the only difference if that sunpower goes into 'waste heat' immediately or gets temporarily used for work before turning into the exact same amount of waste heat.
Fossil fuels are releasing energy that was taken from the sun millions of years ago, but the direct heat outcome of burning all that is dwarfed by the greenhouse effect of emitted gasses - small changes to how much Earth radiates into space matter much more than the heat produced by burning that fuel.
The same applies for nuclear, which does generate extra waste heat but it is not significant compared to the greenhouse effect.
"A total of 173,000 terawatts (trillions of watts) of solar energy strikes the Earth continuously. That's more than 10,000 times the world's total energy use." [1]
We have a long way to go before humanity's heat output is anywhere rivalling the heat the Sun dumps on us. Most of our power generation (except nuclear) is just repurposing the Sun's energy anyways, delaying its conversion into heat so that we can extract work from the process. The same heat is generated with or without our power plants. (Fossil fuels delay for so long that the energy release occurs at a much faster rate than it was gathered, but still insignificant compared to the regular solar energy incident on the Earth).
Taking the articles figure of 77,000 kWh per year per person. Lets call it 100,000 (10^5) kWh per year per person and a population of 10 billion (10^10) people, we are looking at 10^15 kWh/year of energy, which is about 10^14 watts. Earth receives about 10^17 watts of solar energy, so we are looking at an increase of about %0.1 of the energy budget. This is ignoring energy coming from non solar sources (there is a lot of geothermnal energy coming from within the planet, but I'm not sure what rate that makes it to the surface).
Interestingly, this still overestimates the role of our waste heat for an even simpler reason: much of it was going to be heat anyway. Waste heat generated from fossil fuels is pure extra energy (although that effect is still dwarfed by the greenhouse effect for anything beyond the very local area). Nuclear is effectively net positive on heat as the natural half life of the fuel is far longer then when it is put in a reactor.
However, solar energy is by definition part of that 10^17 watts of energy that is going to hit the Earth weather we generated electrons from it or not (Granted, solar panels probably reflect less of that energy back into space). Wind energy is pulling kinetic energy out of the air that would have become heat. Geothermal is taking advantage of heat that was already there (although we accelerate how quickly it reaches the surface). Hydroelectic energy would have become heat once the water finished loosing its potential energy when it reaches sea level.
I am amused by the optimism of these responses. Nobody is concerned that if we end up with cheap nuclear fusion that humanity won’t use a lot more of it? Would humans stop building resorts in deserts?
We can't even get a stable grid, decent infrastructure, or stocked supermarkets... let alone fancy technology. I would't hold my breat about that going forward.
Well, let's remove taxes on oil, etc! Let's stop putting governmental barriers in place such as when recently Canada refused permission to build natural gas plants. Governance needs to step out of the way, and let the free market do what it needs to!
I remember a scene in Sopranos where Tony told off his lietunants for not making a enough money for him. “This business is like a pyramid” (more or less).
Where would the rich gangsters be if the low-level thugs had enough money in order to not pursue crime? They would still have those who are more in it for the thrill than the money, but would it be enough?
This article focuses on the fantastic tech. breakthroughs that need to happen. Let’s assume for a second that all of that is possible in a world without antagonisms. But what if rich entities are better served by other entities being poor than then being of moderate means? What would be the energy output of those antagonisms manifesting themselves? That should also be taken into account.
All poverty is institutional and societal poverty. People are poor not because of lack of energy, but because the societies they live in lack the inclusive institutions that can create those patterns for energy use, education, healthcare and anything else.
When you put those institutions in place, the effect manifests itself as economic growth, energy use, increased education etc., which in turn strengthen those political institutions, which in turn beget more growth.
Sorry to nitpick an article that primarily talks about energy, not development, but we need to agree on the root problem. If aliens drop an unmovable fusion reactor in Rwanda tomorrow that can output enough free energy to reach western levels, that will probably not lift the country out of poverty but start a bloody civil war about who owns it and can sell the energy to everybody else.
And if not that specific instance, consider a theoretical lone hermit or tribes (say, the Sentinelese), not subject to any social pressures or constraints, but lacking in the necessities of a thriving life. Or similarly isolated peoples in preindustrial times.
I'll allow that much poverty is socially imposed, particularly since the Industrial Revolution. I balk at the claim that all poverty is.
If climate change is an existential threat, we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit. If you truly believe climate change is super serious, then logically government ought to put its thumb on the scale to ensure a lot of people get priced out of energy intensive products like air conditioning, leaving their computers on at night, meat, aluminum, and so on.
If you're a nationalist, it's even better if the people we're impoverishing are overseas, and therefore the poverty we create to save the planet is Somebody Else's Problem.
It's like people on the left have two conflicting goals, and haven't figured out how to deal with their mutual exclusivity:
- We have to Save the Planet, so we need to stop being Evil Greedy Capitalists and using a bunch of energy.
- We have to Help the Poor, so we need to stop the Evil Greedy Capitalists from making energy expensive and keeping it out of reach of the poor.
(Personally, I believe climate change is real and human-caused, but its worst effects will take place over many years, and we'll have enough time to adapt to it. If New York City will be underwater by 2080, so be it. Manhattanites will figure out that they need to relocate when the water is lapping at their ankles; they won't stick around until it's over their heads. I subscribe to the Millian view that technology and abundance generally helps human progress, so we ought to be focused on making energy as cheap as possible. For example, fusion research is woefully underfunded relative to its potential.)
> we should be engineering a rise in gas prices, and cheering when peoples' lifestyles take a hit.
Gas prices are so high right now in EU that my fathers sister is closing her restaurant and letting go her employees. If they go even higher then what you will see is blood on the streets and right wing governments in power, then you can forger about your plans to save the planet. You think we are so slow with fighting climate change because we don't know how to do it faster? We know, just the costs of doing it are so huge that no one will take responsibility for it and they know they would lose power very quickly to far right wing party.
Every civilization is always three missed meals from revolution.
> No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.
> This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.
Technology increases productivity. Not all energy destroys the earth, see nuclear energy. More technology has enabled us to feed the earth with less people devoted to food production. Etc.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
Ozzie_osman|3 years ago
The main point I got from the article was a helpful reminder that a large part of the world doesn't have basic things that I take for granted (not just refrigeration, but you might also include air conditioning, transportation, etc). And that if we did want the entire world to live a life that includes things like that, we just don't have the energy right now.
EDIT: I kept thinking about this and it doesn't stop at just basics. It's also things like living in a comfortable, well-manufactured home. Being able to buy toys for your kids. Taking airplanes to visit family or to vacation. Enjoying the consumption of meat, or food delicacies. The list goes on as you expand the threshold from basic necessities, to comfort, to luxuries, and you can decide where you want to draw the line.
ciconia|3 years ago
Hear hear. The point is, for those of us living in developed countries, is that all wealth is energy wealth. The western way of life is totally dependent on an abundance of cheap energy. When energy runs out, or becomes significantly more expensive, it's game over for developed countries. That's why Europeans are currently terrified.
For those wishing to go a bit further than nitpicking the article, look up the following two concepts:
- Peak oil [1] - Energy returned on energy invested [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
burlesona|3 years ago
onlyrealcuzzo|3 years ago
The US spends enough energy on transportation that the entire world could have refrigeration.
The US spends 28% of total energy consumption on transportation. 93.33 Quadrillion BTUs x .28 / 3142 (BTUs per kWh) / 365 (days per year) = 22.8B kWh per day.
BEV vehicles are 5x more efficient than ICE vehicles.
We could have the same standard of living and just not use gas-powered vehicles and save ~22.8B kWh per day.
If I'm doing my math right, that's more than enough energy for 3B households to have refrigeration.
The problem isn't that we don't have enough energy.
The problem is that most of the world is really poor.
In the simplest of terms - you can't get much cheaper energy at scale than $0.10 per kWh. A lot of households are living on $2 per day. They can maybe afford 5% for refrigeration - but a refrigerator only lasts 7 years or so and costs $200+. That's another $0.08 per day. That's pushing 10% for refrigeration. I don't think they can afford it.
And when you're that poor - you're probably not going to be able to get electricity reliably for $0.10 per kWh...
When you're that poor, $0.18 = close to half the calories you need for the day. I don't think you can just shift that to refrigeration. What are you going to refrigerate anyway?
joe_the_user|3 years ago
It's bad to take that resource starvation as the only/primary cause of poverty. The example I like using is that the life expectancy in counties in Alabama has been less than that in Bangladesh for a while. Here, individual's lack of access to resources which exist in the area is more the issue.
One of many articles on this: "Life Expectancy in Some U.S. Counties Is No Better Than in the Third World" https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/07/life-ex...
gambiting|3 years ago
The gap is incredible.
lrwilke|3 years ago
jokoon|3 years ago
But at least carbon pricing allows us to visualize the problem.
moistly|3 years ago
Heck, within our own nation. [uncomfortable silence]
soulofmischief|3 years ago
ZeroGravitas|3 years ago
And we'd have more, cheaper energy if we deployed new renewables.
But the author seems to lose his interest in helping the poor if it didn't involve fossil fuels being used inefficiently.
coldtea|3 years ago
A lot of poverty is societal poverty (of order, collaboration, help, education, distribution, and so on) and is worse, even all other things (like relative cost of energy to average salary) being equal.
You can be a slum-living destitute poor in a country even though you have financial access personally to several times the energy expenditure of someone in another country (or area of same country) with a different lifestyle.
mellavora|3 years ago
And we still had rich and poor.
Poverty is when you don't have a good place in society, lack of respect by your fellows, and no security for your physical safety or property.
mrshadowgoose|3 years ago
Above that though, there are other factors, and IMO, there are only two other fundamental ones: cognition (the capacity/time to perceive and manipulate the world by directing energy towards goals) and social capital (society allowing you to direct energy towards your goals, and/or supporting your goals through application of their energy and cognition).
influxmoment|3 years ago
cryptonector|3 years ago
abetusk|3 years ago
If the article is right and all it takes is around a doubling of the current global energy, at 1.1% population growth and a global annual increase in energy usage of 2.5%, this gives around 50 years before we start producing enough energy to push poverty levels below 1%.
_vdpp|3 years ago
41b696ef1113|3 years ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Windup_Girl
beefman|3 years ago
How persistent is civilization growth? (2011) https://arxiv.org/abs/1101.5635
Can we predict long-run economic growth? (2012) https://arxiv.org/abs/1211.3102
Modes of growth in dynamic systems (2012) https://doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2012.0039
Thermodynamics of long-run economic innovation and growth (2013) https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.3554
Long-run evolution of the global economy: 1. Physical basis (2014) https://doi.org/10.1002/2013EF000171
Long-run evolution of the global economy: 2. Hindcasts of innovation and growth (2015) https://doi.org/10.5194/esd-6-673-2015
Global wealth n years after 1801 (2015) https://twitter.com/clumma/status/593890418028253185
See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoeconomics
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1441993975
thriftwy|3 years ago
cryptonector|3 years ago
This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
brnt|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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quasarj|3 years ago
zenon|3 years ago
bowsamic|3 years ago
hydrogen7800|3 years ago
geysersam|3 years ago
jibe|3 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Venezuelan_blackouts
So you need energy but also stability. And minimizing corruption helps as well.
Air dropping barrels of oil, or solar panels without regard for social, civil, and technical infrastructure isn't that helpful. But there are a lot of areas that are primed and would benefit from just adding energy.
theptip|3 years ago
klabb3|3 years ago
superkuh|3 years ago
gautamcgoel|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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avgcorrection|3 years ago
haltingproblem|3 years ago
One of the biggest (hidden) revolution in healthcare for poor rural Indian women is availability of LPG cylinders to replace fossil fuels - wood and cow dung - for cooking. Fossil fuels cause lung deaths [1] due to indoor pollution. The green agenda cuts against it.
The biggest enabler to education is electrification. I vividly remember growing up 20 years ago that only the middle class with electrification could afford to compete in schools as you needed to power light bulbs to study at night. No electrification and reliable supply then you cannot study. The situation is worse in villages with no electrification. Forget computers and internet, this is just about having enough to power a 40 W equivalent light bulb to read a book.
Many times, the agenda of the liberal west seems like class warfare against the poor of the third world: "we will not give up our heated/cooled mansions and our SUVs and our extravagant vacations across the globe but will make energy so expensive that you are crowded out of the market". A British business can afford a 20-50% power bill hike or even go out of business, a third world poor citizen is pushed over the edge into grinding poverty.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1178622119874314
spaceman_2020|3 years ago
The cost of the AC, while hefty, wasn’t that big of a deal. The real brag was that they could afford to keep X number of ACs running.
Even today, my dad switches off the AC in his room early morning to cut down on his power bills.
brink|3 years ago
nuclearnice3|3 years ago
> There’s really no end in sight yet for improvements in solar and batteries. Cost drops are continuing simply from scaling up, and new materials and technologies are on the horizon that could generate continued price declines per unit of energy.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/answering-the-techno-pessi...
manholio|3 years ago
So if you can buy today cells that are 18-20% efficient, you should not expect dramatic improvements in the next decades, only very gradual. The cost will continue to drop, so given the huge areas available for solar, the potential is still huge.
MicolashKyoka|3 years ago
Self-sustaining robot factories would give us the means of almost unlimited labor that we could task with building out all the infrastructure we'd need to lift humanity away from the reaches of nature's tyranny.
visarga|3 years ago
photochemsyn|3 years ago
> "There's probably about 3 million households in Rwanda, and a vanishingly small number have a fridge. A refrigerator uses about 2 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of energy per day, so if we were able to get one into every household, that would add about 2 billion kWh (2 terawatt-hours, or tWh) to Rwanda's annual energy usage. That's about as much energy as there is contained in 1 million barrels of oil — and fully one-third of Rwanda's current primary energy consumption."
1) Energy-efficient refrigerators are available at ~1.1 kwH/day. This reduces the needed energy estimate by about half.
2) Energy capture for refrigeration from solar in Rwanda makes much more sense than oil production does. Under full sunlight, a decent 2.5 kW solar array produces about 10 kWH per day (as the full 2.5 KW is only produced at noon, tailing off towards morning and evening). As you probably want to run the refrigerator at night, a battery capable of storing about half that output (5 kWH) would also be needed.
The notion that you'd want to set up an oil-burning power plant (which only converts energy stored in oil to electricity at ~25% efficiency or so) in Rwanda is pretty silly.
As far as claims that there isn't enough land to set up solar panels to provide this minimal home energy supply, the roofs of most dwellings would provide adequate area. It's also possible to grow a wide variety of crops in conjunction with wind turbines and solar panels on agricultural land (wide spacing is all).
ebiester|3 years ago
> It can be done. In the near term, it is conceivable that already-common sources of renewable energy like wind and solar power can meet most of the need. Things would be easier if existing nuclear power technologies were expanded, or at least if we avoided shutting such plants down prematurely.
> But the more fanciful world described above—the one in which, thanks to plentiful energy, the world has eliminated want—is possible only with continued innovation. In the long term, the renewables we currently have will hit a ceiling.
nordsieck|3 years ago
There's a number of people experimenting with converting chest freezers to chest fridges using an external thermostat. Apparently, these can be extremely efficient - people are reporting 10-20% of your 1.1kwH/day number.
Of course, the typical downsides of a chest freezer apply to a chest fridge - they're typically much more limited in size compared to their upright counterparts due to ergonomics, and the larger they are, the more difficult they are to fully utilize.
But they're a lot better than no fridge at all.
affgrff2|3 years ago
WalterBright|3 years ago
My experience with power failures is that the refrigerator will keep the food cold enough overnight if you don't open the door.
Even so, the refrigerator could make ice during the day and be an ice chest at night. No need at all for a battery.
izend|3 years ago
misto|3 years ago
mkl95|3 years ago
lostapathy|3 years ago
Like the plains of the US, even in Native American times trees were too precious to burn.
Panzer04|3 years ago
There's nowhere near enough natural wood worldwide to meet our energy consumption
colinsane|3 years ago
- computation gets used to automate billing in the telecom and finance industries.
- a little bit faster and arcades explode across the globe.
- a little bit faster and CAD transforms how the transportation industry approaches engineering.
- a little bit faster and radio astronomy can correct all the measurement distortions digitally and image everything with greater effective precision.
- a little bit faster and we can simulate more aspects of chemistry or biology and identify beneficial drugs more easily.
energy experiences this same thing: each incremental decrease pushes some latent tech/application past its tipping point and soon enough the landscape looks completely different at $0.10/kWh than at $10.00/kWh. consider in the list above that all the tech advances aren’t just due to the FLOPS of your computing base, but also the cost to operate that computation — which is fundamentally tied to energy prices.
woeh|3 years ago
Does anyone understand how the article arrives at these figures? I might have missed something, but these numbers seem to me as a lot. According to my energy provider my 2 person household uses about 2100kWh annually. This is in my case without gas-powered heating, and external power use (such as personal transportation, or production of bought goods).
I can understand if these more indirect uses of energy are included in the average, however it would be helpful for the discussion if these numbers were explained. It might for instance help to explain how the West can slash it's energy use five fold, as the article suggests.
SilverBirch|3 years ago
rr808|3 years ago
Finland seems high in those numbers though, maybe because its all cold?
megaman821|3 years ago
bottlepalm|3 years ago
ebiester|3 years ago
If you have energy, you have refrigeration. You have the manufacturing properties to produce the things necessary for children to focus on education. You have the agricultural properties to increase yield and reduce the number of people needed for the agricultural sector, making education more valuable.
mrshadowgoose|3 years ago
An "educated society" just means a "necessary amount of trained cognitive power to direct energy towards the goals/purposes we value". Currently that's exclusive domain of the human brains within our workforce. However, there is absolutely no fundamental requirement for the cognitive power to be human. Once AGI is achieved, artificial constructs could rapidly (no 20-30 year training cost per single unit!) take over the vast majority of cognitive burden from humans.
I personally believe that we will achieve AGI on a timescale far far shorter than any kind of mass attempt to improve education across the world.
*Whether AGI is used to usher in a utopic civilization, or one of many possible dystopias, will of course depend on what groups end up being in control of it.
MrsPeaches|3 years ago
1. Access to lighting at night means students can actually do their homework.
2. Access to internet also boosts students attainment.
3. Having access to electricity means you are able to retain the best teachers as they won’t stay for long without all the mod cons.
We’re trying solve both problems at the same by teaching kids electronics by building a solar charge controller:
https://energymakers.academy/
michaelt|3 years ago
People who have to fetch water by hand and wash clothes manually don't have time to read books on nuclear power plant design.
And societies with poor education can't build and maintain complex power infrastructure like nuclear power plants.
xyzzyz|3 years ago
hedora|3 years ago
It's infuriating that rather than increasing the cost of energy by 1%, we decided to destroy the entire planet.
It's even more infuriating now that I've read H.G. Well's "The World Set Free.", which was written in 1913, and covers the same topics as this article, but with a more savvy take on current day energy politics.
The problems it focuses on haven't been addressed, and we're living the worst case scenario the book posits. (The better case scenario the book focuses on is a global collapse of government due to full scale nuclear war in the early days of atomic weaponry.)
spicybright|3 years ago
That said, we have some very good cautionary tales like black mirror that make people think, but those are very few. In fact, most stories in this genre start with "in an apocalyptic world where people X, Y happens".
It would be nice to see some modern black-mirror quality adaptations of ideas by H.G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and even authors like Mark Twain would be great.
svnt|3 years ago
shp0ngle|3 years ago
drran|3 years ago
Barrin92|3 years ago
Your supercomputer from the 80s ate a lot of energy but didn't necessarily do a lot of work, economic or otherwise. Almost all devices we use now are less energy hungry but more useful than they were decades ago. They've gotten better not through energy consumption but better design.
In the same sense refrigeration or artificial cooling isn't necessarily the only way to deal with heat. One could think of lifestyles, food choices, technologies, or supply chains that are optimized for a particular region that reduce the amount of storage required, or a city designed around maximizing architecture and shade to cool with less need for AC, and so on. The Artic Apple is genetically engineered to not brown, eliminating food waste not by energy consumption but genetic engineering.
There should be more work on flexible solutions tailored to individual communities rather than trying to push the 20th century industrial solutions on places which largely cannot support or maintain them.
oulipo|3 years ago
WalterBright|3 years ago
the_gipsy|3 years ago
Is this true? I have never seen this argument against renewables, is there any math? I can't imagine running out of space, with panels on roofs and windmills between fields.
hedora|3 years ago
Anyway, if it were true, fission is clean enough and unlimited enough for all practical purposes. Fusion is even better (in theory).
CompelTechnic|3 years ago
-More expensive energy directly leads to less energy-intensive activity, and a lot of this energy-intensive activity is the sort of activity that helps human flourishing.
-A tendency to regulate activity such that the most energy-optimized activity is the only allowable/ affordable activity.
-Regulating away the ability to do things, especially things that have questionable externalities and the regulators don't see the immediate value of. Is it really a good thing that the Netherlands is destroying the livelihoods of farmers to protect natural areas from Nitrogen emissions? Who quantified the harm associated with the nitrogen emissions? How does this harm food security in the Netherlands? How does this fare in relation to the fact that energy independence and food independence go hand-in-hand, at a time when there is a global fertilizer shortage and a European energy shortage? Seems short-sighted to me.
Arn_Thor|3 years ago
m463|3 years ago
m3kw9|3 years ago
neilwilson|3 years ago
Which is where economics goes wrong. The working units are incorrect.
You'll note that economics likes to use currency as its working denomination, when the actual underlying denominations are kWh and the labour hour.
Nearly all the failures of macroeconomics can be laid at the belief that there is a one-to-one correlation between moving money around and doing stuff. There isn't and that's the problem.
The issue is similar to electrical engineers assuming that true power and apparent power are always the same.
snapplebobapple|3 years ago
rootbear|3 years ago
dredmorbius|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
nine_k|3 years ago
«The limiting factor for [civilizations] is collective intelligence, not energy.
We already have access to far more energy than we could possibly use on earth for any technology that's actually buildable. But we're not using it because we don't have the species IQ to make the right choices.»
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28232083
pbhjpbhj|3 years ago
Maybe intelligence is about organisation (of neurons) but still, organisation towards a common goal that isn't further enrichment of the most insanely greedy seems like our major problem on a species level.
avgcorrection|3 years ago
gadders|3 years ago
I wonder which would save most lives overall? I would also note that those living in poverty currently don't seem to have a vote on the approach to take.
hedora|3 years ago
nkmnz|3 years ago
nine_k|3 years ago
It's pretty hard to be intellectual and kind when you toil for subsistence every day and barely have enough food.
kevingadd|3 years ago
hedora|3 years ago
alas44|3 years ago
Note: presented in a controversial way, that's the style of this speaker
olivermarks|3 years ago
'If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there'd be a shortage of sand'
expanded out to the giant unelected global bureaucracies some people would appear to want to give permission to run energy supplies.
rglover|3 years ago
Truly sad to see humanity limit/destroy itself over and over when there are perfectly viable options available.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
ZeroGravitas|3 years ago
But instead they weirdly skipped over it and started fantasizing about some new technology that doesn't exist yet.
What happened to energy poverty being important? "The current cheapest, cleanest, safest sources of energy in history aren't green enough for me" was not an ending I expected.
Is this intentional pro-fossil fuels propaganda, written with full self-knowledge of that fact, or are they just so wrapped up in lies that they think this weird rant somehow reflects reality and is helpful to society?
I genuinely don't get it.
Is it possible to write that many words on a topic and intentionally get "primary energy" wrong and believe that it reflects the actual useful economic work done? They mention nuclear a couple of times, so surely they're aware that nuclear can generate both heat and electricity and it's the electricity that's most helpful?
Quick summary from the boring stodgy IEA
https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/7ebafc81-74ed-412b-...
> In the net zero pathway, global energy demand in 2050 is around 8% smaller than today, but it serves an economy more than twice as big and a population with 2 billion more people. More efficient use of energy, resource efficiency and behavioural changes combine to offset increases in demand for energy services as the world economy grows and access to energy is extended to all.
> Instead of fossil fuels, the energy sector is based largely on renewable energy. Two-thirds of total energy supply in 2050 is from wind, solar, bioenergy, geothermal and hydro energy. Solar becomes the largest source, accounting for one-fifth of energy supplies. Solar PV capacity increases 20-fold between now and 2050, and wind power 11-fold.
> Net zero means a huge decline in the use of fossil fuels. They fall from almost four-fifths of total energy supply today to slightly over one-fifth by 2050. Fossil fuels that remain in 2050 are used in goods where the carbon is embodied in the product such as plastics, in facilities fitted with CCUS, and in sectors where low-emissions technology options are scarce.
> Electricity accounts for almost 50% of total energy consumption in 2050. It plays a key role across all sectors – from transport and buildings to industry – and is essential to produce low-emissions fuels such as hydrogen. To achieve this, total electricity generation increases over two-and-a-half-times between today and 2050. At the same time, no additional new final investment decisions should be taken for new unabated coal plants, the least efficient coal plants are phased out by 2030, and the remaining coal plants still in use by 2040 are retrofitted.
> By 2050, almost 90% of electricity generation comes from renewable sources, with wind and solar PV together accounting for nearly 70%. Most of the remainder comes from nuclear.
Theodores|3 years ago
Nigeria still has the colonial yoke and problems of corruption, corruption and more corruption. Which is necessary for resource extraction, which serves to keep the country in poverty.
The World Bank/IMF and other big organisations have had the best part of a century to lift afflicted African nations out of poverty but they saddled them with debt instead.
The only people serious about alleviating poverty are the Chinese. They believe in peace and prosperity and we call them Communist. China has taken hundreds of millions of people out of abject poverty. We have got the numbers and those numbers are a good basis for how much energy the world needs.
Personally I think this topic is best understood with a petri dish and a bloom of mould. We are that mould and when the energy supply is exhausted our presence on the petri dish diminishes.
Gravityloss|3 years ago
Computers - instead of desktops, straight to smart phones and tablets.
Banking - instead of a lot of bank branch offices and having to travel and queue, straight to online banking (and even being very advanced compared to many western countries).
It could be so with refrigeration. Solar power is potentially a really good fit for that.
Maybe electric scooters will do a lot for mobility at some point and people can skip the whole car thing.
unknown|3 years ago
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betwixthewires|3 years ago
This is my main problem with it. I'm concerned that the environmental damage from these energy sources is worse than that from less dirty fossil fuel sources like natural gas.
osigurdson|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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gizmo686|3 years ago
A refrigerator/freezer running at 1.17 KwH/day goes for about $800 USD. [0]
For $100 USD, I can get a solar panel that claims about 300 Wh/day[1]
This puts the cost of energy at about the same as the cost of making the energy useful. Obviously Rwanda isn't going to buy retail from Home Depot. Further, I suspect that when done at scale, you will find that the discount you see over retail for energy is more significant than the discount you see for refrigerators.
Granted, making the refrigerator requires energy. However, it also requires a factory and components. Making those requires energy, but also other factories and components.
Looking at how this plays out in a developed country. In the US 2021, the electricity industry had a revenue of about $430 Billion [2], for an economy with a GDP of about 23 Trillion [3]. In total, energy accounts for about 5% of GDP. [4]
Running that $800 USD refrigerator I mentions above would cost me about $0.08 USD/day
Sure, doing stuff requires energy, and we need to prepare for the energy demands of developing nations to increase. However, the cost of energy is a small fraction of the cost of most of the stuff you want to do with the energy. Sure, if energy was orders of magnitude cheaper, then that may enable more usages of energy, but even those things would require investment beyond energy generation to do.
[0] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Frigidaire-20-5-cu-ft-Top-Freeze...
[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/Grape-Solar-100-Watt-Monocrystal...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/190548/revenue-of-the-us...
[3] https://www.bea.gov/news/2022/gross-domestic-product-fourth-...
[4] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=53620
GartzenDeHaes|3 years ago
https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/rwanda-today/news/power...
NavinF|3 years ago
There a lot of refrigerators cheaper than $800 and just about all of them cost more to power than to buy.
theropost|3 years ago
dukeofdoom|3 years ago
Alot of the policy decisions are made by people least affected by them. This also explains rise of Trump and populisim.
Here in Canada, in our 5 party system, Trudue was voted in by the margin of office workers in Toronto. And proceeded locked down hard, responding to their hypochondriac fears. Their suffering of laptop work from home and food delivert to their door was so bad that many wanted to extend the lockdowns indefinetly.
unknown|3 years ago
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westurner|3 years ago
Carrying capacity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrying_capacity
> The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment, given the food, habitat, water, and other resources available. The carrying capacity is defined as the environment's maximal load, which in population ecology corresponds to the population equilibrium, when the number of deaths in a population equals the number of births (as well as immigration and emigration). The effect of carrying capacity on population dynamics is modelled with a logistic function. Carrying capacity is applied to the maximum population an environment can support in ecology, agriculture and fisheries. The term carrying capacity has been applied to a few different processes in the past before finally being applied to population limits in the 1950s.[1] The notion of carrying capacity for humans is covered by the notion of sustainable population.
Sustainable population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_population :
> Talk of economic and population growth leading to the limits of Earth's carrying capacity for humans are popular in environmentalism.[16] The potential limiting factor for the human population might include water availability, energy availability, renewable resources, non-renewable resources, heat removal, photosynthetic capacity, and land availability for food production.[17] The applicability of carrying capacity as a measurement of the Earth's limits in terms of the human population has not been very useful, as the Verhulst equation does not allow an unequivocal calculation and prediction of the upper limits of population growth.[16]
> [...] The application of the concept of carrying capacity for the human population, which exists in a non-equilibrium, is criticized for not successfully being able to model the processes between humans and the environment.[16][20] In popular discourse the concept has largely left the domain of academic consideration, and is simply used vaguely in the sense of a "balance between nature and human populations".[20]
Practically, if you can find something sustainable to do with brine (NaCL; Sodium Chloride and), and we manage to achieve cheap clean energy, and we can automate humanoid labor, desalinating water and pumping it inland is feasible; so, global water prices shouldn't then be the limit to our carrying capacity. #Goal6 #CleanWater
Water trading > Alternatives to water trading markets (*) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_trading
LCOE: Levelized Cost of Electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity
LCOW: Levelized Cost of Water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_water
TIL about modern methods for drilling water wells on youtube: with a hand drill, with a drive cap and a sledgehammer and a pitcher-pump after a T with valves for an optional (loud) electric pump, or a solar electric water pump
Drinking water > Water Quality: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water#Water_quality :
> Nearly 4.2 billion people worldwide had access to tap water, while another 2.4 billion had access to wells or public taps.[3] The World Health Organization considers access to safe drinking-water a basic human right.
> About 1 to 2 billion people lack safe drinking water.[4] Water can carry vectors of disease. More people die from unsafe water than from war, then-U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon said in 2010.[5] Third world countries are most affected by lack of water, flooding, and water quality. Up to 80 percent of illnesses in developing countries are the direct result of inadequate water and sanitation. [6]
A helpful risk hierarchy chart: "The risk hierarchy for water sources used in private drinking water supplies": From Lowest Risk to Highest Risk: Mains water, Rainwater, Deep groundwater, Shallow groundwater, Surface water
TIL it's possible to filter Rainwater with an unglazed terracotta pot and no electricity, too
Also, TIL about solid-state heat engines ("thermionic converters") with no moving parts, that only need a thermal gradient in order to generate electricity. The difference between #VantaBlack and #VantaWhite in the sun results in a thermal gradient, for example
Is a second loop and a heat exchange even necessary if solid-state heat engines are more efficient than gas turbines?
Any exothermic reaction?! FWIU, we only need 100°C to quickly purify water.
kwhitefoot|3 years ago
selimthegrim|3 years ago
waynesonfire|3 years ago
https://youtu.be/--QS_UyW2SY
steve76|3 years ago
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Proven|3 years ago
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sunjester|3 years ago
youssefabdelm|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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mcculley|3 years ago
PeterisP|3 years ago
All renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro, biofuels) comes from the sun anyway and the only difference if that sunpower goes into 'waste heat' immediately or gets temporarily used for work before turning into the exact same amount of waste heat.
Fossil fuels are releasing energy that was taken from the sun millions of years ago, but the direct heat outcome of burning all that is dwarfed by the greenhouse effect of emitted gasses - small changes to how much Earth radiates into space matter much more than the heat produced by burning that fuel.
The same applies for nuclear, which does generate extra waste heat but it is not significant compared to the greenhouse effect.
EdTsft|3 years ago
We have a long way to go before humanity's heat output is anywhere rivalling the heat the Sun dumps on us. Most of our power generation (except nuclear) is just repurposing the Sun's energy anyways, delaying its conversion into heat so that we can extract work from the process. The same heat is generated with or without our power plants. (Fossil fuels delay for so long that the energy release occurs at a much faster rate than it was gathered, but still insignificant compared to the regular solar energy incident on the Earth).
[1]: https://news.mit.edu/2011/energy-scale-part3-1026
gizmo686|3 years ago
Interestingly, this still overestimates the role of our waste heat for an even simpler reason: much of it was going to be heat anyway. Waste heat generated from fossil fuels is pure extra energy (although that effect is still dwarfed by the greenhouse effect for anything beyond the very local area). Nuclear is effectively net positive on heat as the natural half life of the fuel is far longer then when it is put in a reactor. However, solar energy is by definition part of that 10^17 watts of energy that is going to hit the Earth weather we generated electrons from it or not (Granted, solar panels probably reflect less of that energy back into space). Wind energy is pulling kinetic energy out of the air that would have become heat. Geothermal is taking advantage of heat that was already there (although we accelerate how quickly it reaches the surface). Hydroelectic energy would have become heat once the water finished loosing its potential energy when it reaches sea level.
mcculley|3 years ago
coldtea|3 years ago
verisimi|3 years ago
(for the avoidance of doubt, not being sarcastic)
avgcorrection|3 years ago
Where would the rich gangsters be if the low-level thugs had enough money in order to not pursue crime? They would still have those who are more in it for the thrill than the money, but would it be enough?
This article focuses on the fantastic tech. breakthroughs that need to happen. Let’s assume for a second that all of that is possible in a world without antagonisms. But what if rich entities are better served by other entities being poor than then being of moderate means? What would be the energy output of those antagonisms manifesting themselves? That should also be taken into account.
manholio|3 years ago
When you put those institutions in place, the effect manifests itself as economic growth, energy use, increased education etc., which in turn strengthen those political institutions, which in turn beget more growth.
Sorry to nitpick an article that primarily talks about energy, not development, but we need to agree on the root problem. If aliens drop an unmovable fusion reactor in Rwanda tomorrow that can output enough free energy to reach western levels, that will probably not lift the country out of poverty but start a bloody civil war about who owns it and can sell the energy to everybody else.
dredmorbius|3 years ago
Was that a social poverty?
And if not that specific instance, consider a theoretical lone hermit or tribes (say, the Sentinelese), not subject to any social pressures or constraints, but lacking in the necessities of a thriving life. Or similarly isolated peoples in preindustrial times.
I'll allow that much poverty is socially imposed, particularly since the Industrial Revolution. I balk at the claim that all poverty is.
WalterBright|3 years ago
csense|3 years ago
If you're a nationalist, it's even better if the people we're impoverishing are overseas, and therefore the poverty we create to save the planet is Somebody Else's Problem.
It's like people on the left have two conflicting goals, and haven't figured out how to deal with their mutual exclusivity:
- We have to Save the Planet, so we need to stop being Evil Greedy Capitalists and using a bunch of energy.
- We have to Help the Poor, so we need to stop the Evil Greedy Capitalists from making energy expensive and keeping it out of reach of the poor.
(Personally, I believe climate change is real and human-caused, but its worst effects will take place over many years, and we'll have enough time to adapt to it. If New York City will be underwater by 2080, so be it. Manhattanites will figure out that they need to relocate when the water is lapping at their ankles; they won't stick around until it's over their heads. I subscribe to the Millian view that technology and abundance generally helps human progress, so we ought to be focused on making energy as cheap as possible. For example, fusion research is woefully underfunded relative to its potential.)
lossolo|3 years ago
Gas prices are so high right now in EU that my fathers sister is closing her restaurant and letting go her employees. If they go even higher then what you will see is blood on the streets and right wing governments in power, then you can forger about your plans to save the planet. You think we are so slow with fighting climate change because we don't know how to do it faster? We know, just the costs of doing it are so huge that no one will take responsibility for it and they know they would lose power very quickly to far right wing party.
Every civilization is always three missed meals from revolution.
Victerius|3 years ago
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Worlds-Energy-Prob...
> No politician wants to tell us the real story of fossil fuel depletion. The real story is that we are already running short of oil, coal and natural gas because the direct and indirect costs of extraction are reaching a point where the selling price of food and other basic necessities needs to be unacceptably high to make the overall economic system work. At the same time, wind and solar and other “clean energy” sources are nowhere nearly able to substitute for the quantity of fossil fuels being lost.
> This unfortunate energy story is essentially a physics problem. Energy per capita and, in fact, resources per capita, must stay high enough for an economy’s growing population. When this does not happen, history shows that civilizations tend to collapse.
And Hyman Rickover's 1957 speech on energy and scarcity: https://ourfiniteworld.com/2007/07/02/speech-from-1957-predi...
Climate change is chiefly caused by two things: uncontrolled population growth and energy consumption growth.
A high standard of living - and civilization itself - is impossible without high energy consumption per capita.
Do you see the problem?
I can think of solutions that would be effective, but it would involve a lot of suffering.
cdiamand|3 years ago
It looks like the author has a history of writing like this. I wonder what her track record of being "right" is?
pickovven|3 years ago
seibelj|3 years ago