Fascinating argument, but unfortunately, we are doomed. That is, unless we go nuclear. Apart from that, there is nowhere near enough energy or resources to maintain our current lifestyle (and that's ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the world's population don't enjoy this lifestyle and very much wish to) in a "renewable" fashion.
There is absolutely no reason to assume that nuclear energy will be cheaper than wind and solar. For hydrogen production the "base load!!" argument doesn't apply either. You can just produce hydrogen when power is plentiful.
Just fine, if you're happy with approximately 1/4th the energy output for a given (manufacturing) energy input. And that's for the best case, for certain wind power installations. Solar is the worst, at about 1/15th the energy output for the same energy input (compared to nuclear). [1]
I fail to see how this argument is "debunked". I'd also like to see what other arguments are on my supposed list.
By 1/4th, do you mean 1/4th of nuclear? Sure, I'm totally happy with that. Once EROI is high enough, further improvement has only marginal effect. If EROI of PV is 10 (say) and nuclear is 40 (say), that just means nuclear is 1/10 - 1/40 or .075 better than PV by this metric. The contribution of this to the cost difference is minor, and is swamped by the other contributions to the cost of nuclear.
The EROEI of nuclear is 106, by the link I previously provided. The very best solar installations have an EROEI of 7. That means nuclear gives 106/7 = 15x more energy output than solar, for a given amount of manufacturing energy input.
It's a simple ratio calculation, I'm not sure why you decided to subtract the reciprocals of the two numbers.
> Once EROI is high enough
The EROI of solar is 7, which means you get 7 units of energy output for every unit of energy expended in manufacturing. That is a terrible return. In no way is that "high enough". In fact, we shouldn't be bothering with it at all.
The estimate for EROI of PV IN EUROPE is somewhere around 8, and of course Europe is a terrible place for solar -- the EROI for PV in a sunnier place, like Chile, Namibia, or the middle east, would be nearly twice this. If energy costs were really important, one would not put the PV factory in a place where energy were expensive.
That the EROI of solar is adequate should be obvious because the economic return on investment is good. If solar in Dubai can come in at less than $0.02/kWh then the energy cost (which will always be just a small fraction of the total manufacturing cost) will be reasonable.
Attempts to show PV has bad EROI very often run into methodological problems, extending the system boundaries beyond what analyses of the competing systems use (if you extend the boundary far enough, to the whole society, in steady state the EROI always converges to 1, since all energy produced is consumed somewhere. This is not a meaningful result.)
Which will make fuel much more expensive, and thus less consumed (which is really what is needed). Obviously that will also mean poor people can't travel very far, but what are you going to do about that? Maybe just hand out a universal ration of 1 gallon of biofuel per year per person.
>They'd also know that pretty much the only condition we're treating nowadays is Covid.
Do you have a source for that? The percentage of Covid patients in ICU wards in the UK peaked at somewhere near 30% for a short period in January 2021.
>the folks on HN must not have many friends working in medicine for if they had they'd realize those friends are swamped and burned-out.
Now I do know this to be true, but it's not due to the absolute numbers of Covid patients. In my experience (as I know several people in frontline healthcare), its the side-effects of Covid restrictions making healthcare impossible to provide.
The next line is "deaths with covid on the death certificate", which is different and is actually a higher number and the more important number, as it deals with people who died of covid induced pneumonia after a multi-week stay in the ICU, but not people who by chance had a heart attack after contracting a mild case.
Now there's where we get into interesting territory. The UK significantly relaxed regulations around March 2020, and basically made it very easy to put "Covid" on death certificates. The requirement for a coroner's report in the case of a novel disease (ie, Covid) was also dropped, as well as the requirement to do a Covid test (or even certify the death in person). [1]
As a result, it will never be possible to know how many died of specifically Covid, and how many died of a viral-induced pneumonia.
We know how many people die of non-covid viral induced pneumonia in a normal year (and in a bad year). Most of it is caused by the flu. We also know that covid policies have demonstrably reduced flu rates to some of the lowest ever over the past few years.
So what other cause of viral induced pneumonia do you suppose is the one killing everyone?
I already did. We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked.
I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?
> We will never be able to find out how many people specifically died of Covid, and how many died of a viral pneumonia, thanks to the changes in death reporting guidelines that I linked.
What do you think causes viral pneumonia? If you get in a car crash and bleed out and die, they put both "massive hemorrhage" and "vehicle accident" on your death certificate. If you die of covid-induced viral pneumonia, they put both on your death certificate, because the covid is what caused the pneumonia. You're trying to draw a distinction where there isn't one. Deaths from covid-induced viral pneumonia are deaths from covid, in exactly the same way that deaths from car-crash induced massive bleeding are deaths from a car crash.
> I find it absurd to believe that flu "went away" - do you have any evidence for that?
See https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm#anchor_16336269..., notably the heading "Are there other metrics that can be used to compare the 2020-2021 flu season with past seasons?", which shows a table. That table compares the 2019 and 2020 seasons. Essentially they tested around the same number of specimens and the incidence of influenza was 1000x lower.
This is probably the most accurate datapoint, other things match up (such as reported hospitalizations also being ~100x lower than the year prior) but those are more prone to accidental misclassification of flu-as-covid. You can't really screw up a test in the same way. But generally speaking, they were low enough that the CDC couldn't actually calculate the likely impact, it was too low to make reasonable predictions about. This year it's higher, but still 10x less than a normal year.
(the reason for this is also straightforward: covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission)
Clue's in the name. A respiratory virus, of which there are many.
>covid-19 variants are generally more contagious than the flu, so mask and social-distancing policies that are somewhat effective at reducing covid transmission are vastly more effective at reducing influenza transmission
Apparently common colds and the like are even more contagious than Covid-19, as the country where I live has had a mask mandate since September 2020 and I have been ill numerous times with regular sniffles and colds.
I take your point with the data you provided (although there's no information on sampling methods and thus the statistical significance of those numbers. We also don't have a similar data point for the UK), but it's a stretch to attribute it to masks and social control measures. I'm not in the US, but I don't think that policies have changed much over the past year - yet flu is back this winter.
> Clue's in the name. A respiratory virus, of which there are many.
So again, if not covid, what other thing is causing the extreme spike in viral phenomena deaths? Is it some other novel virus that no one noticed or did we suddenly become more susceptible to the common cold?
> Apparently common colds and the like are even more contagious than Covid-19, as the country where I live has had a mask mandate since September 2020 and I have been ill numerous times with regular sniffles and colds.
Anecdotes are not data, but if we're sharing them, your experience would be unusual in my neck of the woods.
> but it's a stretch to attribute it to masks and social control measures
It really isn't.
> but I don't think that policies have changed much over the past year - yet flu is back this winter
Compared to a year ago, social distancing and mask mandates are far weaker. December 2020, gyms were closed and I couldn't go to work and restaurants were at 25% capacity or outdoor/takeout only. Today gyms are open, I can work from my office, and restaurants can run at full capacity.
This is completely bogus. The ever-increasing global demand for soy foodstock is already accelerating the destruction of tropical rainforests - how is it all sustainable to burn huge amounts of foodstock that so we can enjoy making the world "a smaller and better place" [1]?
Just for fun - an acre of soy produces 70 gallons of "biofuel", so a square mile of soy plantation can produce around 45,000 gallons of fuel, or enough to fly a 747 for about 10,000 miles. After slashing and burning a patch of rainforest, you get about 3 years of crops, before you need to leave it for around 10 years to "regrow". If all of the Amazon rainforest (2,000,000 sq miles) was slashed and burned for soy plantations, and assuming it can magically regrow in those 10 years, we will get enough fuel over one 13-year cycle to fly 5 billion miles. That is about 1/10th the total airplane mileage in one year. [2]
Using foodstock, or land that even competes with foodstock, or land that is important for sensitive ecosystems or CO2 balance is obviously all out of the question if this technology is to be viable.
It's possible to make sustainable jet fuel using trees from forests that aren't competing with food supply. Without that, yes, it's a bad idea. Anything involving soy or palm is usually also a bad sign. But in principle, nothing says you can't use "good" raw materials to produce fuel.
Arguably the Amazon rainforest isn't competing with food supply, at least on a global scale.
The UK has only just started reversing the almost complete deforestation it experienced due to human demand for fuel and materials. Once you start adding in calculations for "how sustainable is my product, once I've cut the trees down and have to wait for the forest to re-grow", you find that not much is sustainable at all.
This works off of carbohydrates and lignin, including cellulose. Assuming (CH2O)n + nH2 --> (CH2)n + nH2O, then 46% of the weight of dry biomass turns to fuel. The yield of Miscanthus is about 16 dry tonnes/acre/year. Jet fuel is 3 kg/gallon, so this would be about 2400 gallons/acre/year.
Just eyeballing that, it's 2 grams of hydrogen per 30 grams of carbohydrate. So, about 1 tonne/acre/year, or maybe half a kilogram per gallon. The hydrogen right now almost certainly is tapped off existing industrial supply, which comes from natural gas, but there's no reason one couldn't use "green hydrogen" from renewable-powered electrolysis instead. PV produces much more energy/acre than biomass does (and can produce it even outside the growing season), so this wouldn't increase land use very much.
Generating 500g hydrogen requires 25kWh (and a perfectly-efficient electrolyser would require 20kWh). One gallon of fuel has about 40kWh of energy available.
To put it another way - by this proposed system, assuming 35mpg, an annual personal mileage of 5000 miles would need a dedicated installed solar capacity of 2kW nominal, assuming a 20% capacity factor. This takes up 15sq. meters. Mutiplied by the population of the US, that's 4,500sq km of solar, just for fuel for driving.
The majority of the energy content of the "sustainable" fuels in your scenario would have to come from sources other than the biomass feedstock. Sure solar generates more power per acre than photosysntheis, but it's very expensive - especially in a sustainable world where the solar panel factories are powered by solar panels, and not by coal.
Right. Using biomass to generate that hydrogen would be bad. Biomass, among all the renewable energy sources, has very poor power/area. PV is an order of magnitude better.
It's not at all clear that PV is more expensive. In the best global locations it's already below $0.02/kWh -- and one would want to do this processing where the inputs are cheap.
Add to that: this is all forward looking, so we must also consider that PV will continue to get cheaper. Extending the historical experience curve to the point the world is solar powered will drop its cost by another factor of 4. This may or may not happen, but calls in the past that the experience curve had reached its limit were wrong.
Using the advertised final cost of electricity is, in my opinion, a useless way to work out the sustainability of any power source. It is skewed beyond usefulness by government incentives, tax breaks, etc etc.
If we're talking about renewable and sustainable power, the only way to look at it is the embodied energy of the device. As I alluded to, the only way solar panels are as cheap as they are is because they are all made using coal or other fossil power. Solar panels require an enormous amount of energy to manufacture - the energy payback period is over 20% of the panel's expected lifetime. This clearly indicates that the price per unit of energy in a system powered by solar would be much higher than it is now.
We also haven't even touched on the idea of where on earth (literally) all of the minerals required to make this gigantic number of solar panels, will come from. PS. Invest in mining, "renewables" are making it a very profitable business right now.
> Sustainable aviation fuel can be made from any of 60 different feedstocks — among them plant oils, algae, greases, fats, waste streams, alcohols, sugars, captured CO2 and other alternative feedstock sources and processes. The Department of Energy estimates that the United States alone has the resources to produce 50–60 billion gallons of SAF per year.
By "article", you mean "marketing blub from someone trying to sell you something".
Ultimately, all of those "sustainable" feedstocks will have to be grown. As my quick maths points out, the size of the field we're going to need is just staggering.
>The Department of Energy estimates that the United States alone has the resources to produce 50–60 billion gallons of SAF per year.
I'd like to know where from. Actually, I looked it up. It's the "Billion Tonne Plan". It involves "thinning" all US forests, and planting practically every available acre with crops for biofuel. Basically, dedicating all of the available plant matter grown in the US to burning for transportation.
It's bogus that jet fuel can be renewable, at least in anywhere near the quantity we currently use. Mainly because the amount of arable land needed is staggering, and we already are destroying virgin rainforest just to feed the world.
I mean sure, you can reach that conclusion if your number is off by a factor of 30.
The amount of carbon in paper, cardboard, and food in existing municipal solid waste streams in the US would be nearly enough to make the current US jet fuel demand. It's not like replacing all liquid fuel use -- jet fuel is about 6% of US liquid fuel demand.
Assuming we use the hydrogen conversion process you mentioned, and have fitted the 1000's of square miles of solar panels it would need - I find it hard to believe that the US throws away 90 billion kg of carbon-rich domestic waste every year (apparently, the US gets through about 15 billion gallons of jet fuel per year).
Obviously, even if this is true, we then need to address the other 94% of liquid fossil fuel use.
The point is not necessarily to suggest that landfilled material be what is used to make jet fuel, but to point out the volumes are not enormous compared to what's already flowing through the economy. The US produces even more agricultural waste -- over 200 million tonnes of corn stover each year, for example.
The other fuel uses may in many cases be replaced by non-fuels, for example by electrification. Aviation is a special case where the high energy density of chemical fuels, and particularly hydrocarbons, will often be unavoidably attractive.
Do you really think that our current lifestyle is at all sustainable, without using nuclear power?
So far, you have suggested that we build several 1000 square miles of solar panels, and dedicate 90 billion kg of carbon-containing material annually, just to fuel 5% of the world population's aviation habit. How do you propose we replace the other 94% of that 5%'s liquid fuel use? After that, how about their total energy use (which dwarfs the total liquid fuel use)?
Absolutely. Nuclear power is neither necessary nor particularly useful. Not only is it too expensive, but if used to power the world it requires either breeders (which have not been found to be competitive with our current burner reactors) or very aggressively cheap sea water uranium extraction.
1000 square miles of land sounds like a lot, but for land at $1000/acre (which you can find in much of the US) that's $640M, or maybe 6% of the cost of a single one reactor nuclear power plant.
BTW, the world produces 2,000 million tonnes of municipal solid waste each year. The global production of agricultural waste is also very large. I also wonder how you're going to be fueling those nuclear powered aircraft, if not with carbon-containing synfuels.
I don't even care about the cost of the land, it's the mind-boggling amount of solar panels that would need to be manufactured to fill it. Have a think about how the panels would get shipped and fitted in this proposed facility - the panels would start degrading and reaching end of life before you could get anywhere near completion.
Look, you're arguing by vague feeling and handwaving there, not by calculation. If you actually look at the numbers, solar's going to be cheaper than nuclear here. The shipping argument is obviously wrong if you think about it even a little.
I think you need to step back and ask yourself why you're allowing yourself to make such silly statements. You look like a person defending an irrational prejudice.
Not sure how you can say that, when almost every comment I've ever made to you has had some kind of calculation in it. Sounds like it is you who is attempting to dismiss arguments with hand-waving. How can solar possibly be cheaper per unit of power than nuclear? Do you understand how EROEI works? It's about 15x greater for nuclear than solar, which is about the most inefficient way to generate power.
>The shipping argument is obviously wrong if you think about it even a little.
Humour me - how, exactly? How exactly is it "not a problem" to ship and install several thousand square miles of solar panels? Just for fun, here's another calculation for you to ignore:
To make the 15 billion gallons of jet fuel needed per year (for the US), you need 7.5 billion kg of hydrogen, requiring 375TWh (at 50 kWh/kg H2). Assuming an annual output of 360MWh per acre of solar, you need a million acres, or nearly 2000 square miles of solar panels (just to remind ourselves - this is just for jet fuel for the US, as you seem determined that this is feasible to do sustainably. I'm not sure what we will do about the other 99.9% of total US energy usage).
A commercial solar panel weighs 40 pounds and is 5ft by 3ft. Assuming they fit, you can load up a semi trailer with 1000 of those panels, for a total area of 15000 sq ft of solar per semi truck. You will need 4 million 18-wheeler loads of solar panels, for this proposed 2000 sq mile array. I'm not the one "handwaving away" the obvious difficulties here. The Evergreen container ship would need 200 journeys, loaded entirely with solar panels, to carry them all.
Apparently, installing the panels is the easy part. Hooking them all up to the grid is the time consuming part. I'm not sure what hooking up a 2000sq mile array would look like, as it is somewhere over 1000x greater than the current total world solar capacity.
Legitimacy is determined in the eyes of the userbase, in which software they decide to use and what ledger they regard as the canonical history of the network, i.e. what blockchain they sync. Whichever "Ethereum" the majority of users use is the "Ethereum."
How much electricity does this contraption need to generate, before it's accounted for its own embodied energy (that is, the power needed to manufacture it)? Probably more than anyone would ever actually use one.
It reminds me of solar panels on cars. It sounds great if you don't think too hard about it, but a highschool physics course can easily prove how completely useless it would be in practice.
Ideas like these end up being nothing but virtue signaling, whether people know it or not.
Practically all of our "green" solutions rely on the fact that their energy-intensive manufacturing is done somewhere with lots of cheap (and polluting) energy sources.
Show me a wind-powered lithium battery factory and I'll change my mind.
1. I absolutely hate the chatty style when it's used to spread the description of a js API over many tedious pages, let alone when it's used for a scientific subject like this one.
2. >SARS CoV2 has a stable genome, its genetics change very slowly.
Is such a misrepresentation it is basically untrue. Coronaviruses are (+)ssRNA viruses, which are not the very fastest-mutating RNA viruses, but mutate much faster than DNA viruses.
We don't need to invoke other mechanisms to explain why Covid mutates rapidly. As soon as it was found to be a coronavirus, that fact was already known.
Approaching the point? IMHO, we passed that point long ago, probably as early as May 2020. We're just into super-extra-bonus destruction of social, economic, cultural, and education systems now.
That's the point. I call it "knowing what you need to be in control of your life".
> It's ten times more difficult to adapt to changes without information at hand.
I understand - for me, the argument goes that if I find myself needing to frantically google something, then I'm already on the wrong path. I accept this means that some lifestyles are not possible. Personally, I prefer it.
The issue is your mind is a terrible place to keep context because it’s unreliable and untrustworthy. Things get in the wrong order, warp into different things and sometimes even completely disappear. Any level of complexity to handle and you need to offload some of the load somewhere else lest you screw up. I’m known to be incredibly reliable and organised and that’s only because of the knowledge of above.
It’s not about frantically googling stuff. Last weekend the trains here went to hell here in the UK and the information at hand by the staff on how to get home was completely wrong. I managed to source information from elsewhere and that made the difference between me getting home at 21:00 or 23:30. Similarly when plan A fails (oh crap the restaurant we were going to is gone) then you can adapt to a plan B quickly with a good outcome.
