A+

I expect it will be significantly lower cost per trip over its lifetime than any competing mode of transport in existence today, including air and rail.

Both bitcoin and hyperloop could in theory be powered by 100% renewable, non-emitting sources of energy.

Tesla should start selling gas guzzlers because in theory...

I mean everyone knows the earth is finished at this point, any effort made now is just white knighting. Driving a gas or diesel truck is more natural than life itself to me.

What do you mean?

Renewable powered transport requires two things:

(1) sources of renewable energy;
(2) vehicles capable of using that energy.

A concrete example: these two requirements are manifest in Washington State. Most electricity is already renewable. This is not theoretical and will only proliferate to other locations.

It is a fallacy to say that EVs are not justifiable because the electricity they consume is not (yet) derived from renewable sources. Instead, EVs are a necessary but not sufficient condition for renewable transport.

Necessary.

If you believe this, you are wildly over confident in your ability to understand complex long-run phenomena.

I can't wait for solar powered everything backed by nuclear fusion. But we'll probably be living in space by then.

What I mean is that I live in reality where bitcoin produces more carbon emissions than a small country. You live in theory where Tesla could have a zero carbon footprint selling gas guzzlers for bitcoins.

The appropriate place to solve the issue of carbon emissions for bitcoin, or any energy intensive industry, is upstream, by reducing the relative cost of non-emitting sources. This is already occurring, in reality, not in theory.



As for white knighting, the greediest capitalists on earth are licking their lips at the business opportunities in renewable energy production.

Praise god for the free market.

lol at that chart. No, renewables are nowhere near cost competitive with grid power and can never be until fundamental problems like storage are solved. Power that peaks only a few hours a day and is unavailable 14+ hours/day isn't power, it's a fraud.

There are also no business opportunties in renewable energy that aren't government subsidized or niche (off-grid places). Taking taxpayer money and delivering utterly worthless renewable energy is a booming business though, I'll grant you that.

I don't know if that chart reflects replacement cost. A rooftop system has a lifetime of 20-25 years, and then needs to be replaced. Some wind turbines have even shorter lives. I've seen similar charts that ignore replacement costs, and do not consider soiling which degrades performance about 25%.

Not sure what "under certain circumstances" means either.

This is akin to TSLA choosing in 2021 to start powering some of its assembly lines with a coal power plant and then saying that it's not TSLAs job to solve the carbon emissions issue.

TSLA doesn't have to accept Bitcoin. It actually went out of its way to get in bed with this dirty technology.

Nuclear power is non emitting and does not require storage; whilst not technically renewable, for our current purposes it’s unconstrained by fuel supply. Safe technologies exist now, and the plants can and should be built in more remote locations, even if transmission loss is 10%, and upfront cost is higher. But, politically fraught.

Solar thermal power can have storage capacity without batteries.

Hydro reserves can store energy, and even in the absence of that, is generally available.

Solar panels are not my favorite technology by a long shot but they do have modularity and low upfront costs on their side.

I prefer a carbon price to direct subsidies (negative externalities are about the strongest case for government intervention in markets); but energy businesses across the spectrum (renewable, fossil, etc) are all heavily subsidized. Energy is a critical requirement for civilization and national security. Renewables are hardly unique in respect of receiving subsidies, but have the added imperative of solving for carbon emissions.

What’s your take on how to solve CO2 emissions btw. Is your answer nuclear?

There’s probably a detailed breakdown of Lazard’s LCOE on their website.

This is not true. Any power source that uses steam to power generators requires storage/backup in the future.
The reason is that you take cold water from rivers and put it back afterwards when it's been warmed. You can only do this up to a certain point or you start killing everything downstream (because warm water is less soluble to oxygen)

This is why nuclear powerplants have already been (forcibly) taken off-line in summer. With increasing climate change these occurences will become more frequent making nuclear powerplants (and by extension coal and gas - and of course fuison should that ever work) not 'baseload safe'. Increasing temperatures also means efficiency for all these types of powerplants drops (i.e. electricity prices go up).

Of course you can do dry cooling, but that lowers your efficiency also...which in turn drives up cost of power significantly yet again.
With nuclear already beeing way more expensive than wind and solar it really makes no sense other than as a form of graft for big business/politicians.

(It's only cheaper if you ignore ancillary costs like waste disposal and safekeeping and that they are not insured - unlike every other powerplant type...pretty much like we ignore all the costs from coal mining as a cost of electricity because you have to keep pumping up the water that flooding into the mines in perpetuity)


However, you're again beholden to countries that mine it. You're just switching one dependency for another. The advantage of wind and solar is that it gets rid of all these causes for war.

Only on paper. When you get to actually building them corners will be cut and cheapest possible materials will be used. Always. Because that's the only way how you win the bid for one of these things (if not through outright bribery). Even in an ideal world: none of these 'safe' designs have even made it out of the prototype stage. The timeline to optimize and eventually start building them is far too long.

In the end this is why it doesn't matter. There's like 5 companies in the world who can build nuclear powerplants and we'd need several thousand of these, ASAP. Building one can take close to a decade.
Nuclear power is just way too late to be considered as a viable solution (or even a meaningful contribution)

Nuclear power is currently more of a problem than a solution because any investment in nuclear takes money away from wind/solar/storage that could be online much quicker.

Nuclear power needs water. Water flows in rivers. Human settlements tend to be near rivers. Finding places on rivers that aren't settled for hundreds of miles around (and where you can find the adequately trained personel to run such a powerplant to boot) is a lost cause.

(As a side note: Rivers run in fissures in the landscape - i.e. places that are the results of earthquakes. Siting nuclear powerplants on top of what amounts to "prime earthquake country" seem pretty dumb to me. Also using power sources that put 2/3 of the generated energy as waste heat into the atmosphere isn't exactly helping, either. But this is not particular to nuclear but also all fossil types as well as biowaste powerplants)

On top of that: Since we need to transform not only the electricity sector but the whole energy sector solar thermal - in conjunction with PV for electricity - makes a lot of sense in that regard. Seasonal storage of heat is actually quite feasible (iron, gravel or ice storage..each of which are dirt cheap)

Unfortunately with climate change ever less so. And hydrostrorage is also pretty much maxed out wherever you look since it's dependent on very specific geographical features.
They're cheap and the space for them is amply available at zero cost (basically every rooftop can be used and would produce way more power than a home would ever need)
Plus: you can have them yourself (unlike any other form of energy production). This can make PV very decentralized and therefore very robust against manipulation (either price manipulation, outright terrorism or attrition in wartime).

Not nearly as much as fossil/nuclear. If you look up the global subsidies into oil/coal/gas/nuclear vs. those that solar/PV have to do with the discrepancy is staggering.

But, as you say: putting a realistic price on CO2 would solve a lot of the issues instantly. I.e. a price that doesn't ignore 'waste disposal' (or impact on health systems and the gigantic cost that entails every year)

Sounds like a cheap way to create water vapor (which cools the environment BTW), distill it and produce distilled water.

Not sure about the radiation content though.
Solar requires rare earth elements that are almost exclusively mined in China.

They also work near large bodies of water, e.g. oceans.
So storing heat for nuclear is a burden, but not so with solar thermal?
The primary arguments against hydro is that it damages an ecosystem, and the water evaporates, sometimes quickly, e.g. Lake Mead.

Sorta. Though using seawater in cooling has its own problems (much higher maintenance which drives up the cost of electricity). The russians are taking it a step further and constructing the nukes as floating powerplants (and then just dumping the waste in the oceans..who cares about anyone eating fish, right?)

What you want with heat storage is close-by storage because transporting heat over large distances quickly destroys the utility of it.
So either you site the nukes right next to cities (which no one wants to do for obvious reasons) or it just won't be economical.

(No one balks at having a solar concentrator powerplant within a couple of miles of a city. Or on their roof.)

I just think the mere fact that the 'insurance' for nuclear powerplants is the taxpayer - because no insurance company would even dream of touching them - already shows how insane the entire concept is. Countries like the US of China or Russia might not care if somethig goes wrong and just declare a section the size of Texas off limits and fugeddaboutit...but in many other parts of the world that would mean the end of a couple nations. A few Watts of power isn't worth that risk.

It's just not scaleable (anymore) because any place it's viable it has already been built (because it's so cheap).

Though a different form of hydro may have a future if someone can figure out how top make wave energy generators robust and cheap enough. Current efforts have all failed because seawater is a much more nasty environment than people think.

Erm. No. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas. Not as bad as CO2, though.
While water vapor is a stronger greenhouse gas by energy retention it remains only a couple days in the atmosphere...whereas CO2 remains for centuries. A lot of people get confused by this. We could get back to basic equilibrium of water vapor by stopping to emit any excess of it within a couple weeks. Stopping to emit extra CO2 now will get us back to 'normal' in about 1300 years (give or take).

For what purpose (at those quantities)? Not to mention that distilling takes a LOT of power.

Nearly none because the water used in nuclear powerplants isn't in the primary cooling circuit (that would be nasty).
The inner cooling circuit is a closed loop (and pretty highly contaminated. i.e. more waste to store for god knows how many centuries. I wonder what that costs? But currently we don't add that to the cost of electricity because future generations are supposed to pay that cost for us without getting any benefit off it. Ain't we nice? )

What kind of solar cells would that be?

Rare earth elemets are stuff like dysprosium, yttrium, europium, neodynium, ...
none of these are present in solar cells.

(Even if they were. They are not 'burned' so could be endlessly recycled)

Solar cells are made up of silicon, phosphorus (for the dopant) and copper or tin for the electrical parts - all of which is abundantly available.

The up and coming preovskite solar cells are even more basic in terms of materials than that.

Solar panels are notorious at leeching heavy metals into the soil, in both the disposal (especially forced disposal by stuff like hurricanes) and just regular wear and tear (sunlight/rain).

The regular solar cells you get on roofs or as part of powerplants don't contain any heavy metals - so this isn't a viable argument against PV as a primary power source.
Heavy metals are only contained in some thin film cells.

Natural condensation/distallation is the most efficient method for obtaining fresh water from brackish/salt sources. It also does not require a purification step.
You don't trust future generations to figure out technical problems we can't now?
Thin cell. Small % of market. Wind turbines use more.
Recycling costs money. Solar cells are not designed to be recycled. This presents a problem as most of this stuff simply gets put into landfills.
And Silver and Indium and Cadmium? 10% of world wide Silver demand is in producing photovoltaics.

And what to make on ecosystem destruction?

It just takes oodles of power because you have to put in the phase change power of water to steam (and then more power for cooling to get it back again)

Couple of problems with that
1) past generations weren't stupid (if anything the education level for the last generations was higher than for the current one)
2) We don't have time to wait on future generations. The world needs to be carbon neutral (more like carbon negative) by 2050 or it's game over for the human race. We may survive for another century or so but the point of no return is then long past (if it isn't already. One can only hope. Looking at the latest data it doesn't look to good. We're already seeing methane outgassing from tundra permafrost soil and sea floor hydrates. When that stuff hits the atmosphere in quantities - and there's no reason to think it won't - then CO2 will be the least of our problems. If anything the past climate models seem to have underestimated the speed with which things are happening)

Any tech that isn't ready for prime time today (i.e. well out of the prototype stage) won't be in widespread/global use by then. R&D as well as scaling up production and rolling stuff out to the masses takes time.
The best example for this is actually Tesla. They are going at absolute breakneck speed with reserach, development and scaling stuff up - and no one can deny that their growth rate - and how they are throwing up gigafactories one after the other - is just mind boggeling...yet after almost 15 years of growth they are still only a fraction of the automobile market.

The world is a big place. From idea to widespread adoption takes time.

It took the computer 30 years. Similar for the cell phone. Similar for the internet.
Shifting the entire globale energy structure over to something else isn't going to take less time.

Wind turbines do use rare earths (they don't absolutely need to. You can design an electric motor/generator quite well without them. It's just a bit bigger), but
for one: rare earths aren't really rare
second: they aren't used up. Once you have saturated the market they can be reused indefinitely (much like lithium in lithium ion batteries).

For both it's a matter of market price where it's economical to extract them - not a matter of limited supply (heck, you can get rare earths or lithium out of seawater if you absolutely want to. It just currently cheaper to mine the stuff)

Pretty much the opposite. For batteries it's a lot cheaper to recycle than buy new material on the open market. For solar cells the materials (silicon) is plentiful - so there's little point in recycling. The main components in today's cells are glass plastic and aluminium - each of which can be recycled quite well.
As with anything it'll be a matter of cost (or legislation) whether recycling will make sense.

If space is not an object there's also no sense in recycling at all but just keep using them. It's not like they break down. Much like with batteries for EVs they degrade a bit (and the degradation levels off after a time) - but are still usable for many decades after their nominal lifetimes.

So? What else would you use silver for? It's not like it's a useful metal otherwise (pretty much like gold in that regard. It's shiny...but that's about it)
And again: cadmium is used in thin film cells - which aren't used in powerplants and on roofs. That's a red herring fallacy.

What ecosystem destruction? You can put them up on roofs. That alone would suffice to gather enough power for all. Or put it on some waste piece of land. Or float it on a lake (and prevent a bit of evaporation in the process). Or put them alongside highways. PV isn't picky about location
(Wind works best off shore, too...so little point in griping about 'ecosystems' there as well.)

No one is asking you to put up a solar power plant in a national park over an eagle's nest.

On the other hand: griping about 'ecosystems' is just beyond hypocritical. You've driven a gasoline car all your life but I'm sure you've never cared about what that does to ecosystems (neither here nor where it's sourced) - so your 'outrage' is about as believably serious as a rubber dartboard.

Evaporation/condensation is a natural process. No outside energy is required. (although it may be added to increase efficiency)

Trying to place a limit how smart future generations will be is folly. If society progresses at reasonable rates they will almost certainly be orders of magnitude smarter than we are now in many important areas. (e.g. materials sciences, handling of radioactive waste, power generation, carbon sequestration, weather management, etc.)
Not rare misses the point. Rare earth minerals are almost equally spread out in the Earth's crust. But there are only a few known areas where concentrations of rare earths are such that mining can be done efficiently. (e.g. Mountain Pass in CA) China mines close to 90% of rare earths.
You mean recycled. Recycling costs money. We are not running out of rare earths, it's simply who strategically controls rare earths.
You can theoretically extract just about anything from sea water. And I have a plan for that. But that is beyond scope of this discussion, it will be addressed by the "smarter" next generation(s).

The question was IRT solar panel recycling, which we both agree are NOT being recycled but instead filling up landfills.
To design something as ubiquitous as solar panels and not recycle them is kinda dumb, don't you think?
Space is definitely a concern. Landfills in CA are just about full.
What? Silver has many productive uses in society.

Well, somebody is using Cadmium for solar, and it is a very toxic element.
You don't think massive wind turbines and solar farms destroy ecosystems?
So ecosystems don't exist over water?
Ok, so do it on public land and then it's ok? Are eagles more important than other animals? What's the point of identifying a single species when there are thousands of species that contribute to an ecosystem?
You are trying to describe an "average" person. Which has essentially zero meaning in this discussion.

Why is this being portrayed as an either/or situation? We should use whatever is best for a given geography (absolutely including nuclear)