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.
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
Western society is inefficient at a macro level, even though it may seem efficient from the financial perspective of a single company or an individual. People cover huge distances to work. Companies are moving goods, components and people from all over the world. People change jobs (losing focus) and their residence often, companies go bankrupt because of competitive market forces. This means a lot of wasted resources and duplication.
You can decrease the energy consumption significantly without affecting the quality of life in case of adopting a new political philosophy which considers these realities.
This is wholly unsustained. Yes, marginal luxuries will become less accessible, though not inaccessible. Flying, food variety, et cetera. But the sustainable cost of clean energy, and industrial processes running at those levels, is within traditional fuels’ long-term error bars [1]. The discrepancy in access to that energy will persist between the developed and developing worlds.
(EROI is difficult to calculate. Once you take into account shipping costs, the EROI of PV approximates that of oil.)
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricit...
Eastern too
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/World_fo...
Western?! What about cities like Tokyo, Dubai, Beijing, Johannesburg, Singapore?
Giving What We Can is a community of thousands of people giving at least 10% of their pre-tax income to the most cost-effective charities they can find (consider GiveWell.org for research). I'm a proud member and hope more people join.
I'm happy to share thoughts on how to cultivate the empathy and gather motivation to act to help others as well.
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?
A lot of our energy expenditure is lifestyle satisfying. Asia and the better cities in Europe demonstrate you can build dense cities with excellent transit as an alternative to car dependency, but the US fairly universally rejects it from both sides - white flight to suburbs and their perpetual expansion and the inability to actually build dense and transit oriented housing, hell most places use zoning codes to actively prevent its development.
We could do a lot of good for the world just stopping our out of control need to drive cars everywhere and for everything, but the willpower is very much not there, largely because of corporate interference that bred this climate that transit is for poor people and to own a car is to "succeed" in life. Its such an awful, backwards culture perpetuated by the profit motive over possibly the survival of the society.
I've seen this figure before. It ignores the efficiency of the generation of electric power to charge the EV.
A much more realistic figure is 2x.
If there was a net energy gain going to EV, the adoption rates would be through the roof rather than ~1% we are seeing currently.
I wonder if you can have a community fridge with different sized compartments so you can pay for access to the amount of space you need; to me those is like using a launderette rather than paying for a washing machine.
There's plenty of renewable energy out there, we just can't capture it efficiently, store it very efficiently, or move it around very efficiently. As such as rely on power sources that provide output rates were good at capturing energy from: fossil fuels stored as energy, nuclear fission, solar (fusion, sort of, we're not that efficient at it), hydroelectric (kinetic/gravity, solar/nuclear from the sun), and geothermal (which is just partly just fission again).
A lot of stuff just dissipates into the environment and we only capture a small bit of it. With all that said I think humanity will always grow beyond its means in terms everyone having a desirable amount of energy and materials to meet a certain standard of living.
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...
The gap is incredible.
"US statistics are bracing. A nation with 318 million people accounting for just 4.5% of world population consumes more energy for air conditioning than the rest of the world combined. It uses more electricity for cooling than Africa, population 1.1 billion, uses for everything."
I'd love to see some charts that break this down visually (energy consumption by region/type).
But at least carbon pricing allows us to visualize the problem.
Heck, within our own nation. [uncomfortable silence]
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.
In the long term many things are possible, but right now we don't have enough energy, and "if we deployed new renewables" is not an argument - we already are deploying new renewables pretty much as fast as we can, and even if we would deploy them twice as fast, it will still take quite some time to get to where renewables can create all the energy we need - especially if look at the market share of renewables in total energy which includes not only electricity but also heating and transportation.
Solar panels, batteries, wind mills and such do not appear out of thin air.
Who wants a grid where your refrigerator can't run when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn't shining?
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.
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.
I think this article also does a good job in emphasizing country-level poverty is what's really important to think about. That is, in the US, since we already have the infrastructure of a rich country, even poor people can afford safe food and refrigeration (but even then it's not evenly distributed, e.g. much has been written about "food deserts" in the US).
But, in say, Nigeria, they are so undersupplied with refrigeration trucks that making it possible for the poor to get reliable access to safe food would take a massive investment, which would mean a lot more energy.
If you only care about there being a delta between the rich and the poor, sure, there have always been rich and poor people. But that neither usefully describes the world, nor does it account for what poverty actually means and how poverty levels have changed in the last century.
Hans Rosling used to make a joke that the top few percents of students in the Swedish educational system knew less about the world than a chimp (based on the reasoning that if you pick answers to questions randomly, you'll be right more often than the students).
I can recommend watching some of Hans Rosling's talks about poverty and reading his books. It is important to understand what poverty means.
In pre-industrial times, and even modern times, those who were able to compel (or force) people to work for them – i.e. provide them energy – were those considered to have a higher social standing. Those who provided the energy were of lower social standing.
The rich of ancient times had to scrape their wealth from the labour of _so many_ people.
Meanwhile, if we tried applying the ancient poverty line to a modern rich society, we'd have trouble defining it clearly, even homeless people might sit above it, it barely makes sense.
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).
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%.
1 - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23209924-the-water-knife
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:
This is yet another reason that proof-of-work schemes are a disaster for society: they waste its most precious material asset!
There are other options as well. Stored work-product (e.g., banking heat or cold when possible for later use, materials fabrication). Potential-storage mechanisms (batteries, pumped hydro, kinetic, or others). Demand-side rather than supply-side dispatch --- varying activity rather than generation or energy provision to match available capabilities.
I'd first encountered the notion of currency-as-energy in Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth (1975). You'll also find it in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy. Clarke seems all but certainly to have encountered the idea in the work of his own hero, H.G. Wells, where it is a major theme in The World Set Free (1914).
(That's mentioned elswehere in this thread: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32725668>)
The Nobel-prize laureate chemist Frederick Soddy advanced the notion in his own work in economics.
I've explored that history in a Reddit post some years back: <https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24wyty/tracing...>
My own view is that this is attractive and occasionally useful but ultimately something of a mirage. Money is in fact a notional record of claims on production, a social creation (with legal and economic underpinnings). The fact is that money can be transacted for many things. Ultimately, though, those demands must be secondary to the actual productive capability of an economic system, and a fixed peg to anything (gold, silver, Joules, MWh, bushels of wheat (among several original bases, see the shekel), cryptographic hashes/second, whatevs, will run up against reality when the notional value is out of step with the actual available resource. At such times, useful monetary systems must have the capacity to deflate (that is, the currency deflates and prices inflate) to bring the financial and real economies back into balance, as well as to distribute sufficient purchasing power amongst the population. Such inflations are a feature of such systems and a symptom of greater issues rather than a bug or failure of themselves.
Again, my own view, and one not widely shared though elements are beginning to appear in concepts such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).
The fact of one such conversion is only a subset of the larger whole.
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.
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
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.
> 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...
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.
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.
> "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).
> 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.
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.
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.
There are numerous heating/cooling applications in which excess capacity at peak capabilities is banked for later use. Thermal energy storage for thermal energy applications is exceedingly efficient as there are no further conversion losses.
Solar power refrigeration which chills an ice block to an arbitrarily low temperature then relies on that to maintain the chilled-compartment temperature during periods of low or no power would be the obvious option.
That’s why the typical middle America “garage fridge” is such an energy hog.
Like the plains of the US, even in Native American times trees were too precious to burn.
There's nowhere near enough natural wood worldwide to meet our energy consumption
- 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.
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.
Similar to measures of mean national income (GDP/population) or other such aggregate measures.
Note that direct consumption is often a small fraction of total consumption, and household measures of consumption of one form of energy (e.g., MWh of annual electrical use) neglect not only the shares of commercial, industrial, and governmental usage, but of other forms such as natural gas and vehicle fuel.
Finland seems high in those numbers though, maybe because its all cold?
The big thing that the article doesn't mention is that "developed" western countries outsource vast amounts of manufacturing energy usage to other countries. The UK is especially bad for this. We don't make most of our steel, aluminium, plastics or chemicals - so the many kWh required to make them isn't reported in our statistics. China does that for us.
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.
The real prerequisite is an ‘educated society’ so there’s a bit of a bootstrapping/chicken/egg problem which is super difficult to solve.
Not without having invented and scaled manufacturing for the refrigerator is the point. It is clearly not a given that access to energy results in the existence of certain technologies, although it does increase their probability of existence.
All of these things intermix. Having energy is a cause and an effect.
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.
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:
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Anyway, if it were true, fission is clean enough and unlimited enough for all practical purposes. Fusion is even better (in theory).
-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.
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.
«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.»
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.
even this site filled with supposedly smart educated individuals is filled to the brim with prejudices; jingoism; hate; intolerance; short-term thinking and huge cognitive blind spots
Are we lacking kindness? Virtue? Faith? Strength?
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.
It's pretty hard to be intellectual and kind when you toil for subsistence every day and barely have enough food.
Note: presented in a controversial way, that's the style of this speaker
'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.
Truly sad to see humanity limit/destroy itself over and over when there are perfectly viable options available.
The panopticon controls enabled by AI & IoT can easily be used to meter/control energy (and separately water) to individuals. This is of huge concern around 'smart meters'
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.
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.
Please provide some data to back up this assertion?
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.
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.
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-...
https://www.theeastafrican.co.ke/tea/rwanda-today/news/power...
There a lot of refrigerators cheaper than $800 and just about all of them cost more to power than to buy.
This makes gizmo686's argument stronger, not weaker.
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.
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.
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.
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).
If GDP is as tightly-coupled to energy use as data suggest, and we presume, say, 4% annual growth rate, then we have a slight issue.
10,000 times is just over 13 doubling periods' worth of growth. And 4% annual growth rate means doubling every 13.3 years, roughly.
In which case, humans would cut into that 10,000-fold margin in slightly over 230 years.
Which suggests that there are in fact limits to growth.
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.
We just aren't to that point yet.
(for the avoidance of doubt, not being sarcastic)
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.
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.
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.
> Was Man of the Hole poor? > Was that a social poverty?
Yes, he was. He may have chosen poverty freely, as was his right, but there is no doubt he was materially poor compared to most his contemporaries.
Furthermore, the main reason for that poverty was social - he lacked the very foundation onto which to build a productive economy, namely other people in his community. He was also constrained by repressive social institutions - his own life experience and culture and the unprovoked aggression by the farmers - and thus excluded from participating in the larger productive economy.
We can of course speculate about his reasons and worldview, but IMHO it's very plausible he may have wanted not to die relatively young of some preventable disease.
Without those institutions, markets cannot exist, you are just at the whim of a connected competitor, local gang leader, extractive and corrupt government official or unavoidable private monopoly that will fleece everything you create. Therefore you don't waste energy investing and creating for the market, and focus on extracting from someone else.
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.)
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.
I'd argue that would be a good outcome. However, it can't happen over night. The frustrating thing is that the necessary technology has been available for 50 years, but the right wing governments you allude to are exactly the reason they haven't been deployed at adequate scale. (Well, them and the anti-nuclear greens.)
Sorry to hear about the restaurant. That really sucks.
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.
It looks like the author has a history of writing like this. I wonder what her track record of being "right" is?
