(08-31-2022, 06:15 AM)JasonBlack Wrote:Quote:And we are more energy independent because of the potential of renewable energy. 100 square miles of solar power alone (to say nothing of wind onshore and offshore), spread out over the country and on rooftops, can supply ALL our energy needs. Coal is no longer an option, period! That, my friend, indeed needs to be shut down ASAP! Republicans and their Supreme Court resist this, and thus keep the climate crisis accelerating, which creates feedback loops to make the crisis worse and shut down our hydro power.1) You'll have to forgive me for being skeptical. What are you basing this claim off of?
Transmission costs are a large share of the cost of energy to the ultimate buyer. The electric grid entails a huge outlay in infrastructure with high costs of maintenance. Rooftop generation drops the cost of distribution to near zero for the property owner.
100 square miles seems far too small.
Quote:2) Solar power is only able to provide power during the day time. That's fine for much of the year, but not for electric cars which need to be charged at night or during the Winter months when you're without light or power after 5am
Storage could be in chemical batteries with reversible reactions. Consider the Calvin cycle between animals and plants: rice photosynthesizes carbohydrates out of carbon dioxide, water, and sunlight through the process of the Calvin cycle; humans eat rice and metabolize it into (ultimately) carbon dioxide, water, and heat through its reverse. Storage batteries would do both, with the power cells transforming an endothermic reaction to store chemical energy for use by the consumer. I am not sure of what chemicals would best serve the purpose. The Calvin cycle is elaborate chemistry that non-farm industry could never develop on a large scale, but surely we can think of something simpler. Calcium and carbon look good until you add water, in which case you have a dangerously-chaotic version of an acetylene torch.
Quote:3) The carbon footprint of the creation of solar panels is a lot higher than what most people realize, especially given most have a relatively short lifespan.
Technological progress has typically reduced the cost of inputs and made the devices more efficient and durable as well as more broadly useful. Mainframe computers are obsolete, and much of the prediction of advanced technology at one time held that people would often own such a computer taking up 'only' about as much space as a refrigerator. The current constraints on computer size are now on peripherals: keyboards must be large enough to accommodate human fingers if they type (until voice-command inputs supplant them, which is becoming possible), optical screens to accommodate the desires of viewers, and of course printers having to accommodate at the least the normal sizes of paper in scanning and printing.
Quote:4) China has 3-4x the population of America with a fraction of the open space. Easier said than done.
None of this is to say we (or, in this case, China) shouldn't use solar panels. The point is we aren't currently at a point where we can rely on them as the dominant fuel source. We can and should expand their usage, but necessary does not equal sufficient.
Automobiles took their time to supplant horse-drawn vehicles. Iron-hulled ships took their time in supplanting wooden clipper ships. One technology often supplants another due to lesser costs of use; motor fuels and a car engine are far less expensive than oats and a horse. Between the replacement of horse-drawn carriages and automobiles (the 1910's, basically) and World War I, the second decade of the 20th century had to be a nightmare for horses. Southwest Airlines holds that its real competition on its heavily-used Dallas-to-Houston flight is people uneconomically driving their cars along the 200+ miles on I-45 between the two cities. It isn't a matter at all times of someone having the funds; the people who bought the early phonographs were the ones who had little access to live music (and were poor), and the early adapters of television were those who could not afford tickets to boxing matches or baseball games (common early fare) or live theater.
Solar power generation is more likely to appear on very-poor Indian reservations than in the high-income areas of Westchester or Marin County, thank you. Speaking of First peoples, the Potawatomi tribe in Michigan has been adapting solar power in the cloudiest state of the USA, including in the casino that they own in Battle Creek, Michigan:
https://www.wmuk.org/wmuk-news/2015-04-2...nvestments
Don't be surprised if poor blacks in the South do much the same (although they have no rights to own casinos collectively). It might be good for cottage-industry activity that could revitalize their communities. First Peoples had to organize to survive; Freedmen had to disorganize to avoid trouble with White Power, especially its Triple-K wing. I'd say that cheap power is far preferable to machine politics that is the norm for most communities in the ethnically-polarized South as a source of prosperity, wouldn't you?
... Something like 95% of the population of China lives in 20% of its territory. The Takla Makan and southern Gobi deserts and the Tibetan Plateau are thinly populated to uninhabitable. Should the transmission of electrical power (whether directly through wires or through satellite transmission) get cheap enough, then those unpopulated areas will be the sites of huge solar farms. Most Chinese territory is no more habitable than Quebec as a whole, the American High Plains, or the Sahara. People live where the farms are. Living anywhere else is fiendishly expensive. But if you see my pattern of posts, you will recognize that I defy anyone to trivialize the importance of farming in even the most modern of countries. Prosperity of most countries depends upon getting people off the farms to do something else, leaving behind relatively-few, fairly prosperous yeoman farmers (such few Japanese farmers on the whole seem to be doing well).
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.