Always good to see the future arriving, but the job is not done yet by far. We need to be sure not to take our foot off the gas (figuratively of course).
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
Individual states could do that now. Notice that the major tax incurred by a data center is state/local property tax. It's why they often go looking for places with a property tax break, so giving it to them on the condition of "no fossil fuels" could be a pretty viable strategy.
At least in the case of wind the federal government has attacked via the permitting process. That limits what states can do, cutting taxes doesn't help if you can't build at all.
There have often been private deals between renewables and big energy customers but the finances don't always work out how you might expect. Renewable projects are built using debt with interest rates largely based on the likelihood of generating revenue by selling electricity. And because of the long time scale interest can snowball to form a substantial part of the cost. Having a guaranteed customer in the form of a data centre is balanced by the risk that they might go out of business. You are basically coupling the risk of the generator to the risk of the consumer. That is why CfD style schemes are often favoured because it is just a safer source of revenue. Obviously hyper scalers have access to very cheap credit, but they may end up paying more for the electricity.
Decoupling time from the Earth’s rotation paves the way for the future depicted in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep, where they use a straight count of seconds since the UNIX epoch, and units like msecs (million seconds ~= 11.5 days).
Hopefully by the time UTC drifts more than an hour from UT1, we’ll be a spacefaring civilization that is happy to treat time as wholly independent from how a particular rock moves.
I think about Vinge's treatment of time often. Though I find "see you in a kilosecond" doesn't go down well with the family, so clearly some cultural adjustments needed!
It could be that doing things you don’t like is sometimes good for you, and maybe there is a collective preference shift towards avoiding short-term pain at the expense of long-term gain.
Perhaps they are closet climate activists, because raising the price of gas significantly and persistently is realistically the only way we’re ever going to stop burning it.
That's another funny consequence of this conflict: Trump is proud of himself, because he thinks lower exports hurt China, while US oil companies are making record profits. In reality: China's oil reserves are so huge they can last really long time, while their speed up their transformation to renewable energy.
I import more than I export in December and January, but for every other month of the year it’s the reverse by some margin. My annual electricity bill is net negative, and the installation cost will be paid off in 7 years. The numbers would be even better in, say, Spain, but they are perfectly adequate here, despite suboptimal latitude.
Incidentally, the grid only knows about my exports. Self-consumption manifests as demand reduction, so UK solar production and electricity consumption is probably higher than aggregate figures suggest.
It's helped a lot by the fact that solar panels have become very cheap indeed, so the fact that we don't get as much sun as other places doesn't matter so much - it will still pay off, as long as you can actually use that energy effectively (which may require batteries or a decent export payment rate).
> For onshore wind, continuous capex and opex improvements are expected to drive LCOE down 16% by 2060
What’s with the forecasts going as far out as 2060?? Given the scale of changes we’ve seen in just the last 10 years, looking forward 34 years seems absurd, and to still only expect a 16% drop in cost?
Unlike solar, wind has pretty significant construction and material costs which feel hard to diminish with scale. You still need to excavate earth, install giant pylons, enormous magnets, etc.
That being said, anyone who has predicted the future prices of renewable energy seems destined to look a fool.
Yeah, these forecasts are far too long-term, and progress would have to slow down a lot to see such small improvements over such a long time. These are guesses and I'm not at all sure that they are even educated guesses.
What does it really mean to live off grid, anyway? Eschewing electrical and/or road connections takes you out of physical grids, but you still live in the wider and more important grid of depending on other people. It might feel rustic to live in a log cabin or a boat, but if you bought it with capital and heat it with imported fuel, and power it with mass-produced solar panels, and stock it with purchased food, you’re still on the grid of industrial civilization.
This is taking the term away from its meaning IMO. Very few of those who live offgrid mean completely detaching themselves from society, but as a way to reject parts of modern society. As others have said, you are more likely to find those living off the electrical/water/etc grid are generally motivated to form communities of their own, to have more of a dependence of other people, and generally to be closer to those people they are depending on day-to-day.
No perfect solutions, I've found it is usually just people trying to do what they think is right/better way to live in whatever ways they can.
The grid we’re talking about is only, definitionally, the electrical grid, ie constantly paying capital to some company to have an always-available electrical connection that continues cooking the planet even if you’re not using it.
The solar panels on my boat have more than paid back their capital costs and their environmental impact in just the diesel my engine doesn’t need to burn to provide power, and my life is dramatically less expensive because I don’t have to pay tax/rent to a middleman corporation for copper cabling they barely maintain and towers and transmission cables and such that I don’t use at any rate.
Keep stretching your definition like that and the North Sentinelese are on the grid of industrial civilization because their sky is still polluted by the Starlink swarm they’ve no conception of.
I see this as a broadening of the problem of how we assign identities and names to things. Clearly we can name the absence of things too, and in doing so perhaps eliminate their absence…
We need to accelerate clean energy generation even more so we can replace not just dirty electricity sources but dirty energy sources entirely, and produce synthetic petrochemical feedstocks. Modernity runs on hydrocarbons-as-chemicals, not just hydrocarbons-as-fuels, so despite electrolysis and synthesis being hugely energy inefficient, there is literally no alternative. We just have to brute force it at petascale.
reply