Jesse Peltan
@JessePeltan
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On a mission to build Type 1 Civilization and restore the biosphere
Joined May 2019
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If God wanted us to build Type 1 Civilization, he would have:
1. put a giant fusion reactor in the sky
(emitting blackbody radiation around 5800 K)
2. made 28% of Earth's crust out of a semiconductor with a matching bandgap (~1.1 eV or so)
3. filled the oceans with an alkali
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While we're building all this wind and solar, China is building...
*checks notes*
...twice as much as the rest of the world combined.
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While you're arguing about:
"The Sun doesn't shine at night"
"Nuclear's too expensive"
"We can't make that many batteries"
China is:
- building more solar than the rest of the world combined
- building more nuclear than the rest of the world combined
- building more batteries
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I don't think people appreciate the dimensions solar is improving in.
Conversion efficiency isn't the full story.
Yes, conversion efficiency doubled (~10% -> 20%) in the last 20 years, but silicon use per watt fell by 87%! (16g/W -> 2g/W)
Longi now has cells that use just half
@solar_chase
Did you see the super thin cell from
@longi_solar
- 57 μm. Think that type of product might scale? Last I heard, thin cells would break often with current machines.
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The solution to nuclear waste is that it’s not waste.
Current reactors extract only a few percent of the energy the fuel contains. Nuclear “waste” is radioactive because there’s still a ton of potential energy left over.
Fast neutron reactors and waste reprocessing can let us
Oklo has completed the first successful end-to-end demonstration of the advanced recycling process in collaboration with
@Argonne
and
@INL
.
Supported by an award from
@ARPAE
and
@GovNuclear
, this milestone marks a crucial step toward commercial-scale fuel recycling, which is
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Even the "experts" don't understand the implications of batteries this cheap.
CATL has LFP cells for <$60/kWh now.
You're already within a few feet of a battery at all times.
Batteries will be ubiquitous.
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“renewable energy uses too much land”
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@stan_okl
Maybe even put commercial spaces on the first level so people can walk to work or the gym or to get food
It could change everything
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England has more than enough beds!
There are >10 million beds occupied by a single person that could sleep 2 or even 3!
And those beds are typically only used for 8 hours a day! If we sleep in shifts, we could triple capacity!
(or we could just let people build houses)
New degrowther idea just dropped in the UK:
Instead of making it legal to build more housing, they're just gonna... checks notes... reallocate the spare bedrooms in "under-occupied" houses.
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Every citadel needs a
#BitcoinHotTub
.
Few understand this.
#Bitcoin
#SPA256
#BraiinsOS
@slush_pool
@BITMAINtech
@alexa99
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Lots of people know that batteries make solar more valuable, but most people don't know that batteries make solar cheaper.
How is that possible? Don't batteries add costs?
Batteries cost money, but so do transformers, inverters, power lines, etc. Batteries lower the costs of
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If renewables are so cheap, why are electricity prices going up?
As many (like
@duncan__c
) have pointed out, electricity generation is actually getting cheaper but delivering that electricity is getting more expensive.
Increased delivery costs are often attributed to
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The world is greatly underestimating the impact solar will have in the next 20 years. Everybody got it wrong for the last 20 years, and current projections are just as off base.
Solar is rapidly improving in every relevant metric. Complementary technologies (like batteries) are
I don't think people appreciate the dimensions solar is improving in.
Conversion efficiency isn't the full story.
Yes, conversion efficiency doubled (~10% -> 20%) in the last 20 years, but silicon use per watt fell by 87%! (16g/W -> 2g/W)
Longi now has cells that use just half
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Solar has continuously fallen in price following scaling laws for half a century.
I'm sorry. I just don't buy that anybody can look at the data and in good faith conclude "solar is all subsidies"
Tell me. What has a bigger impact?
- a 30% tax credit in one country
- the 19
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People are consistently underestimating growth in solar and batteries.
7.9 TWh is enough to store the full daily production of over 1 TW of solar. The world will soon be able to add multiple terawatts of solar + storage every year.
Demand for batteries is extremely elastic. As
BNEF is tracking a combined 7.9 TWh of lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity announced for the end of 2025.
BNEF's expected demand in 2025: 1.6 TWh across all segments.
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I think people fail to appreciate just how much stronger solar resources are in the U.S. vs Europe.
The Northeast is like Italy. You have to go all the way to Alaska to get solar like Northern Europe.
We have some of the best solar resources in the world. Just look at the
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Solar panels may be flat, but their electricity production isn't.
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"The age of electricity and of copper will be short. At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years
...Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die."
Ira Joralemon “copper mining expert”- 1924
A normal Honda Accord needs about 40 pounds of copper. The same battery electric Accord needs 200 pounds. Onshore wind turbines require about 10 tons of copper, and offshore approx. 20 tons. The world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all human history
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Where are we going to put all these solar panels?
Everywhere.
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How far away is viable fusion?
~94 million miles
But don't worry, that energy is delivered wirelessly to your roof every day.
You just need a SMR (small modular receiver) to harness it.
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It turns out that batteries actually contain a very high concentration of battery materials, about 100%
Redwood is currently recycling batteries at a rate of of 20 GWh/year. That's an extraordinary amount —more than some analysts thought would even be available in the US for a few more years. But it's just a shadow of what's to come 4/
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“Batteries are bad” is not a good argument for nuclear.
Batteries are cheap, getting cheaper, and scaling rapidly. The argument is wrong from fundamentals and it’s becoming increasingly absurd in the face of mounting empirical evidence.
“A 1 GW nuclear reactor produces 2 GW of
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I don’t think people realize just how cheap cost per cycle gets with LFP batteries.
In a C/4 or slower application, you can easily reach 10k cycles.
Stationary storage packs are rapidly approaching $100/kWh. LFP cells are already <$60/kWh.
$100/kWh over 10k cycles is $0.01/kWh
Cycle life improves at lower discharge rates, leading to a further reduction in cost per cycle.
Cheaper storage also makes buffer capacity cheaper, which further improves longevity.
Lithium batteries can serve an extremely wide range of applications. A lot of people betting on
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The "recycling doesn't work" people really need to learn the difference between plastics recycling and metals recycling.
We get half of our steel from recycled scrap in the U.S.
It takes less energy to recycle metals than to refine new ore. That saves money. That's why we do
Redwood is currently recycling batteries at a rate of of 20 GWh/year. That's an extraordinary amount —more than some analysts thought would even be available in the US for a few more years. But it's just a shadow of what's to come 4/
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The grid needs a lot of batteries, even if we never built a single wind turbine or solar panel.
Batteries smooth out demand and improve utilization for generators and grid infrastructure.
It's not solar and wind that's driving current battery deployments, it's falling battery
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The "renewables bad" crowd love to point to California's high electricity prices, but they never seem to mention Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Oklahoma, or New Mexico.
That might be because the top 5 states for wind and solar all have electricity cheaper than the national average.
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PSA: A "4 hour" battery is not "a battery that only lasts for 4 hours"
4 hours is the minimum time to fully discharge a 4 hour battery.
For a given amount of energy stored (MWh, kWh, Joules, etc.), longer duration batteries are cheaper.
A 2 hour, 4 MWh battery requires a 2 MW
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If you're confused about solar and don't see the value, I made this diagram.
I hope it helps ❤️
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6 kW of solar per person is enough to take a country from electricity poverty to electricity abundance.
30 square meters (323 sqft) of solar panels.
That's not just residential electricity use. That's all electricity use: homes, businesses, industry - everything.
What's
The distributed solar story in Pakistan is nuts!!
It's now the third largest importer of solar in the world and basically all of it isn't a part of the utility system.
All of this is in response to the central planners that run the national grid making decisions that ended up
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Good fences make good neighbors.
Great fences make electricity.
Where are we going to put all these solar panels?
Everywhere.
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Photovoltaics are by far the coolest energy tech.
We turn the most abundant elements in Earth's crust into devices that exploit quantum mechanics to harness the power of stellar fusion and convert it into a perfectly ordered form of energy - electricity. Pure exergy under human
I don't think people appreciate the dimensions solar is improving in.
Conversion efficiency isn't the full story.
Yes, conversion efficiency doubled (~10% -> 20%) in the last 20 years, but silicon use per watt fell by 87%! (16g/W -> 2g/W)
Longi now has cells that use just half
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This is a great illustration of the impact batteries are having on electricity markets.
1. Batteries are taking over ancillary services markets. (services that ensure reliability and maintain things like voltage and frequency)
2. Because batteries can provide these services at
@JessePeltan
yep, thx for correction. Chart 1 is increasing AS for BESS, Chart 2 is the lower price as BESS saturate. Chart 3 is decreasing AS for nat gas. Chart 4 is higher nat gas generation.
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Under $100/kWh, solar farms will install batteries just to put more solar on the same grid connection.
Right now, we're seeing solar farms install batteries to capture high evening power prices.
Once you have the grid connection, inverter capacity, etc. each marginal hour of
I don’t think people realize just how cheap cost per cycle gets with LFP batteries.
In a C/4 or slower application, you can easily reach 10k cycles.
Stationary storage packs are rapidly approaching $100/kWh. LFP cells are already <$60/kWh.
$100/kWh over 10k cycles is $0.01/kWh
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How to save energy: ⚡️
Take 1 less hot shower 🚿
- 2 kWh
Take 1 less flight ✈️
- 200 kWh
Harness 1% of Earth's solar resource ☀️
- 15,000,000,000,000,000 kWh/year
Every little bit helps ❤️
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People have the wrong impression about virtual power plants (VPPs).
VPPs don't just aggregate small resources to virtually recreate a power plant or make something that's "virtually" as good as a power plant.
VPPs are way cooler than that. Centralized power plants rely on
If renewables are so cheap, why are electricity prices going up?
As many (like
@duncan__c
) have pointed out, electricity generation is actually getting cheaper but delivering that electricity is getting more expensive.
Increased delivery costs are often attributed to
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@jamesgiammona
Yeah that would be insane.
If the supply chain we needed to harness the power of the Sun could also be used to augment human intelligence…
Computing's silicon demand kickstarted the solar supply chain
It's time to close the loop.
- 173,000 terawatts of sunlight above
- 5 kilometers of silicon below
Solar powered silicon refining, manufacturing, and compute unlocks Type 1 Civilization
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By the end of the decade, "solar" is going to mean "solar + battery" by default.
Batteries increase the value of electricity produced and improve utilization of other system components. The cheapest place to put a battery is where you're already installing solar (or vice versa).
In April 2024, more than 50% of residential
#solar
PV installations were paired with
#batterystorage
.
When we started collecting this data in Oct. 2023, the figure was just over 20%.
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We should use more concrete - not less.
Concrete is a foundational pillar of civilization. It's also an easy answer to "hard to abate" emissions.
Concrete is about 8% of global emissions, but we could make it negative 4%. (or even more if we use more concrete)
Concrete
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If coal plants had to meet nuclear plant regulations, we would have exactly zero coal plants.
Fear of nuclear power has led to a lot of unnecessary deaths from air pollution.
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I see a lot of posts about how hydrogen is "inefficient."
It's important to specify what process we're talking about.
Production of hydrogen through electrolysis has an energy efficiency of ~80-90%.
If you burn that hydrogen in a gas turbine, that process is ~40-60% efficient.
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Making really good induction stoves is a much more effective way to get people to cook with electricity than attempting to ban gas stoves.
Attempting to ban gas stoves is only going to upset a lot of people and make them even more skeptical of electrically powered cooking.
A
Don't blink ... you might miss it 👀
Room temp water ➡️➡️ boiling in SECONDS not minutes
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The only thing standing between humanity and abundant 24/7 fusion energy is building more of these things
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The duck curve is a 2010’s problem.
By 2030, all solar will be solar + battery.
It’s time to start focusing more on seasonal supply/demand mismatches. Batteries have daily storage covered.
In 2024, natural gas generation on an average April day in California hit a 7-year low.
This is a significant trend reversal from what we saw from 2021 to 2023 in CAISO.
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Have you ever considered that maybe..
just maybe...
China covering entire mountains in solar panels has nothing to do with appeasing western environmentalists?
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Please stop equating batteries with wind and solar.
Batteries are just as useful for smoothing out variable demand as they are for variable supply.
Colocating batteries with variable demands improves utilization for all generators, nuclear, gas, and coal included.
Smoothing
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Fusion powered SMRs are scaling faster than any other source of electricity in history.
(Small Modular Receiver)
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Grid scale battery storage is not "battery backup."
Batteries are active assets that improve the utilization of other parts of the grid.
An hour of battery storage at the level of a few percent of peak demand can provide ancillary services that free up thermal generation to
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A single factory will produce enough solar panels to meet peak electricity demand in Texas ... EVERY 18 MONTHS
We cannot afford to put our hands over our eyes and pretend solar doesn't work.
We need to be manufacturing and installing solar at scale - yesterday.
Earth's solar
Chinese PV Industry Brief: JinkoSolar breaks ground on 56 GW solar factory: JinkoSolar has broken ground on a 56 GW PV panel factory in China's Shanxi province. It says the new facility will be…
#Markets
#ModulesUpstreamManufacturing
#TechnologyandRD
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~$2.40/sqft for solar panels in bulk
Solar will be everywhere working in the background
can hardly believe how cheap the pricing is for solar panels. for like $80 (in bulk) you can get a 2.4m x 1.3m bifacial panel that's 665 W peak. solar walls / fences economical? 👀
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So called "petroleum" or "rock oil" is a SCAM.
Oil comes from WHALES. More whale oil is wasted in lamps by people writing letters about fantasy "rock oil" than will ever be produced from ROCKS.
Rocks just don't have the OIL DENSITY. A whale is 50% OIL! Rocks are at most 1%!
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@galu822
We are here to save the ants, squid, and all other life from the expansion of the Sun
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Covering every manmade surface in crystalline silicon to provide an unimaginable abundance of energy IS the crazy sci fi future we were promised.
You don't have to put solar panels in space or cut down rainforests. 1% of the energy in Earth's sunlight is enough to 100x
Photovoltaics are by far the coolest energy tech.
We turn the most abundant elements in Earth's crust into devices that exploit quantum mechanics to harness the power of stellar fusion and convert it into a perfectly ordered form of energy - electricity. Pure exergy under human
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The thing that is truly absurd is that we are having to scale solar using fossil fuels.
>90% of the energy used to make solar panels is electricity. In a sane world, we would have continued to scale nuclear and would now be leveraging that energy to manufacture solar at massive
This isn’t something to celebrate.
Nuclear has energy density of 3,900,000 MJ/kg. It should be number 1. That it isn’t was a choice.
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"oh no, China is DUMPING all these solar panels and batteries!"
Like, you think China has all these secret hidden subsidies
so that they're losing tons of money on every unit
and your "solution" is that we should NOT buy them?
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I see a lot of people saying that transmitting electricity is "inefficient."
Total transmission and distribution (T&D) losses are less than 5%.
The cost of T&D is not losses, it's capacity.
We have to pay the same to build and maintain that capacity regardless of how much we
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Guys. At this point it's completely absurd to predict that solar's growth is suddenly going to level off.
You would need extraordinary evidence to justify an abrupt end to this half a century long trend.
Every year forecasters use some completely solvable roadblock to justify
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The world is just beginning to see solar’s potential.
A lot of people didn’t see coal coming when it was mined by hand and carted by horses.
The supply chain for solar is already mostly powered by electricity. That electricity is increasingly coming from solar.
Cheap solar
The turning point in the Industrial Revolution was not when we started mining coal. It's when we started mining coal - with coal.
Carting coal with horses wasn't a huge leap forward from carting wood. Coal-powered railways and coal-powered mining created the feedback loop that
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You can't solve power reliability with centralized generation.
It doesn't matter how many gas fired turbines you have if they can't deliver power to homes.
We have two options
- underground power lines
- distributed generation & storage
Undergrounding lines is expensive, but
Over 5 million Texans are without power as
#HurricaneBeryl
moves through the Houston area. Restoration will take many days & high temperatures will be in the 90's throughout the week. Today's scheduled
#txlege
hearing on the progress of utility resiliency plans was canceled.
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Who would win?
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China doubles electricity generation every decade.
We used to do this. We still can.
It's high time to build.
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"Electricity is only 13% of primary energy!"
Okay, but 38% of primary energy goes to - making electricity.
If you want to talk in terms of primary energy, you have to look at the energy that goes into generators.
That's what primary energy means - energy before conversion
Primary energy is wrong, but not how you think.
Primary energy gets criticized because it doesn’t take into account the losses that occur when converting and delivering energy.
This makes fossil fuels look like they do more work than they really do because most of that energy
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A 5% improvement in farm yields could spare 2x as much land as getting rid of every:
- city
- home
- mine
- factory
- road
...combined
To feed 8 billion people and restore the biosphere, we need to embrace modern science.
Increased Yields = Efficient farmland use.
Reduced need for deforestation and,
conversion of natural habitats into agricultural land.
⬆ Efficiency.
⬆ Food security.
⬆ Economic development.
⬆ Environmental conservation.
Which do you prefer?
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@JomauxJulien
Vertical south facing is especially helpful for winter
Useful production even at northern latitudes
Der senkrechte Süd-Zaun bringt im Winter, bei tierstehender Sonne, besonders viel. Im Sommer bei senkrechter Sonne entsprechend weniger, daher die fast horizontale Ertragslinie, die meinem Bedarf entgegen kommt. Bei 45° Neigung der Süd-PV wäre der Januar 15% schwächer,
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Solar panels are worthless because they can't produce 100% of your demand 100% of the time.
That's why I never turn off my car.
Idling at stoplights?
That only saves fuel INTERMITTENTLY.
Everybody knows engines need to run baseload.
Keeping your engine at full throttle 100% of
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From: "we could never make that many solar panels"
To: "how are we going to use all these solar panels??"
By 2025 there will be 2TW of annual PV manufacturing capacity, 80% in China. That's enough panels to meet an additional 9% of global power demand. Will we see 1TWh of annual installations and shockwaves across the economy, or bankrupt PV manufacturers?
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I've suddenly become extremely concerned about pumping water around to make stuff
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Everybody name your favorite rare earth element in silicon solar panels or lithium ion batteries.
I'll go first.
Oh wait... There aren't any.
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The age of "coal" is a fantasy!
Coal is mined with pickaxes made from WOOD, in mines lit with wooden torches, transported on wooden wagons, to be burned in wooden homes.
It takes 4 trees to mine just 1 pound of coal!
They will tell you fairytales of "coal powered machinery"
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Methane from cows is not a problem.
The US is missing 60 MILLION bison.
The idea that a healthy ecosystem doesn’t have large ruminants (which produce methane) is clearly ecologically false.
BRING BACK THE BISON 🦬
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Guys. Batteries are <$60/kWh now.
Why would anybody want a vehicle that you can’t fill up at home?
The NAMX HUV is a hydrogen-powered SUV featuring a removable hydrogen capsule system.
[📹 RoCars]
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If you let people make money by installing batteries, they will install batteries.
Real time markets are a great way to do that.
Texas is also leading the U.S. in battery energy storage 🔋🔌
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Primary energy is wrong, but not how you think.
Primary energy gets criticized because it doesn’t take into account the losses that occur when converting and delivering energy.
This makes fossil fuels look like they do more work than they really do because most of that energy
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This is a big reason why EVs are more efficient than gas vehicles, but it's not even the full story.
That 80% loss with a gasoline vehicle doesn't just disappear. You have to actively remove it.
A gas vehicle delivering 100 kW (134 horsepower) to the wheels has to get rid of
That’s fine in the short run, because even if you ran your car off a 100% natural gas grid, you’d still cut your carbon pollution roughly in half compared to a gasoline car. And in the long run the bulk of new electricity will come from lower carbon sources. Don’t worry about it
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The wellbeing of humanity and the fate of all known life depends on our ability to harness the power of the Sun
The entire world today will look impoverished by the standards of a civilization harnessing even 1% of Earth’s solar resource
1,000 kWh ≈ $1,000 GDP
Harnessing just 1% of the energy in Earth's sunlight will transform the world more dramatically than the Industrial Revolution.
The original version of this chart from
@OurWorldInData
is a great illustration of the transformative power of energy. I've
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Twitter Anon: “solar is worthless is the winter”
Their location:
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A lot of people compare small modular reactors (SMRs) to solar and batteries. We made them cheap by producing them repeatedly at scale.
But, solar panels didn't get cheap by chopping them up into smaller pieces to make the same total.
We exponentially scaled module production.
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I see a lot of environmentalists arguing that we need to stop flying planes. That's throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
If jet fuel were free, or twice as expensive, it really wouldn't make that much of an impact on the cost of flying.
Synthetic fuels are expensive, but
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We use less energy now to make a kilo of silicon.
Each kilo of silicon makes more square meters of solar cells.
Each square meter of cells makes more power.
Each watt of power provides more energy.
(panel longevity improvements)
Solar has made massive strides across the
Mariutti challenges the idea that manufacturers could have managed to achieve far higher silicon purity while reducing energy demand, but this is indeed what has happened over the past two decades, helped by economies of vast scale (and material efficiency).
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The reason to move beyond fossil fuels is so that energy can be more abundant, not less.
Sources that are orders of magnitude more abundant than fossil fuels:
Fission
Geothermal
Fusion
Solar (which is fusion with gravitational confinement and solid state conversion)
Let’s perfect and scale these four and build a future that looks like the future.
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China is building more nuclear than the rest of the world combined.
China is building even more solar than nuclear.
China is building coal capacity, but coal is declining as a percentage of total generation.
These are all smart choices.
We should be doing the same.
(but with
While you're arguing about:
"The Sun doesn't shine at night"
"Nuclear's too expensive"
"We can't make that many batteries"
China is:
- building more solar than the rest of the world combined
- building more nuclear than the rest of the world combined
- building more batteries
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“A solar fence! Ridiculous! Solar panels need to be pointed at the Sun!”
Solar haters seem to be acutely aware that the Sun goes down, but unaware that it moves as it does that.
East/west bifacial captures the morning and evening Sun.
North/south captures the winter Sun.
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This apartment building generates 3x its energy demand from solar.
Legalize housing.
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They may look like a Pixar movie, but this is actually an incredibly practical design.
US Postal Service electric trucks are finally here and drivers love them
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Is solar in the U.S. really "heavily subsidized" when the cost after subsidies is twice what it is in the rest of the "developed" world?
Sure, we spend a lot on subsidies. Our 30% tax credit is more than the total cost in many other countries, but that tax credit comes after
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"Solar takes up too much space! It uses too many materials!"
The solar on this home generates 237% of its demand.
You're telling me that we have enough space to have homes with roofs, but not enough space to put solar panels on those roofs.
Earth contains enough materials to
Dieses sanierte Haus von 1936 erreicht dank 17.8 kW PV & effizienter Wärmepumpe einen Eigenversorgungsgrad von 237%.
Wenn jedes Gebäude ein Plusenergiehaus wird, dann minimieren wir nicht nur den Öl- & Gasmilliardenabfluss, sondern schwimmen auch in der Versorgungssicherheit.
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We’re seeing a trend in solar fences because solar panels are as cheap as regular building materials now.
Soon we’ll see the same trend in wall claddings.
Solar will be ubiquitous. It won’t provide 100% of electricity in every region, but it will be passively working in the
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SMRs are on track to pass conventional nuclear in ~3 years.
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The idea that we would build more nuclear if only we didn't have all this solar is so out of touch with reality.
Solar is not holding nuclear back. Solar helps nuclear.
1. Nuclear capacity leveled off in the 90's, decades before we had solar of any significance.
2. Nuclear
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1,000 kWh ≈ $1,000 GDP
Harnessing just 1% of the energy in Earth's sunlight will transform the world more dramatically than the Industrial Revolution.
The original version of this chart from
@OurWorldInData
is a great illustration of the transformative power of energy. I've
If God wanted us to build Type 1 Civilization, he would have:
1. put a giant fusion reactor in the sky
(emitting blackbody radiation around 5800 K)
2. made 28% of Earth's crust out of a semiconductor with a matching bandgap (~1.1 eV or so)
3. filled the oceans with an alkali
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Please stop saying "we need more baseload" when you mean to say "we need more on-demand generation"
No grid has a problem meeting base load.
It's literally the minimum amount of load the grid experiences.
Some grids have a problem meeting peak load.
(the maximum about of load
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When China started producing solar panels, coal supplied ~80% of nationwide generation.
Now it's ~60%
As more fossil-free generation gets installed, the carbon intensity of manufacturing falls.
Every successive generation of panels has a lower emissions intensity than the
The thing that is truly absurd is that we are having to scale solar using fossil fuels.
>90% of the energy used to make solar panels is electricity. In a sane world, we would have continued to scale nuclear and would now be leveraging that energy to manufacture solar at massive
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Lots of people are calling for homes with fewer windows to reduce energy use. They're wrong.
Windows are solar panels!
They're solar thermal, like solar hot water panels. Windows let sunlight inside where it heats up your home. You can selectively shade them to let the winter
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Half the world’s energy use is for industry.
Let’s put the most energy intensive industries where energy is most abundant - Texas.
Texas should just declare that it's mission is to have the lowest cost, cleanest, and most reliable electricity on the planet. Build the crap out of the grid - transmission and distribution. Stop pitting fossil fuels against renewables and nuclear against everyone. Just build
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France could entirely eliminate electricity sector fossil fuel consumption just by better leveraging its existing nuclear capacity.
If French nuclear plants operated at U.S. capacity factors, nuclear alone would produce more electricity than annual demand.
The problem is that
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To put this in context, it takes ~0.8 kWh to desalinate 100 gallons of water.
It only takes 0.8 square meters of solar panels (~8.6 square feet) to generate that much electricity on a daily basis.
We can have abundant clean drinking water for everybody. We just need to build.
Heart-wrenching
@latimes
reporting from the Navajo Nation, where many Indigenous families lack access to clean drinking water even as big-city houses and massive cattle farms suck the Colorado River dry. This graphic by
@lamarr_lemee
tells the story well.
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