Comment by willvarfar

if we didn't transition through the horrible days of CFLs first. since we did, that's a big knock against

A lot of them got built with per-mile subsidies and cashed out via shoddy construction. The ones that focused on long-term financial sustainability more often did fine, but it is a lesson in perverse incentives (though some would argue that afterwards cheap overbuilt lines facilitated much faster and more extensive westward expansion of people).

The lesson, which we learned in the dot-com era and will likely learn again in the AI era, is that the benefits of step-change new infrastructure technology do not accrue in the long run to the infrastructure builders—the technology only creates the step-change if it finds its way to being a commodity!—but diffuses throughout the new, ultimately much larger, more productive economy as a whole.

See also the dark fiber build out before the telecom collapse of ~2001

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecoms_crash

Leland Stanford made out ok, AFAIK

I think India is a bad example. It's very densely populated, with high density in most of the country, and as such it's not a good target market for Starlink.

See for yourself: https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen

India has 1.4B people on 3 million km^2, Africa has 1.4B people on 30 million km^2 (out of which 9 million is Sahara).

Starlink's use case is low population density areas, and Africa has plenty of those. Very different case from India.

I witnessed this traveling through smaller islands in the Philippines. They have cell service without connection to an electric grid in some places. The children with solar charging now have access to education materials and there is access to banking and payments systems.

The effects of this are going to massive and huge in 10 years.

The one issue with cellular connection is that some software and OS slurp data like there’s no tomorrow and you’re not paying for the connection.

That is a lot cheaper than it would cost in a developed country, but is not more affordable.

For example, that would cost about three times as much in the UK but median income is about an order of magnitude higher so its more affordable.

I do realise it is a lot more affordable than telecoms were in the past, but its something like a day of median income.

> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.

Does that operate at good speeds in rural areas?

> Starlink isn't necessary. In India you can get 1GB/day of cell phone data for $4/month, and other developing nations aren't far behind.

There is a huge swath of Australia that does not have good internet access and/or very poor cell phone coverage.

And I am not talking about about people living in the middle of the desert, I am talking about people who are 10 to 15 minutes away by car from a small town.

So yes Starlink or it's local equivalent are necessary.

Great point, you might dream of long range connections sending solar energy from the day into the night around the world.

But, what exactly do you mean by fragility? In what way are they fragile?

If only there was a way to deploy solar production at the point of consumption so power didn’t need to be transferred. We’d need large chunks of unused flat surface pointing towards the sky, preferably at an angle. Oh wait we have that on top of every home (coincidentally the south or west face of every roof provides about enough surface area to power most homes). Now we need some cheap way of storing energy produced during the day for use at night. Humm. Got that too. Government don’t even need to pay the full price for this resilience and climate mitigation. Programs offering fractional tax credits have shown great success in increasing deployments of rooftop solar and distributed battery storage.

The source in your [0] link says China fossil fuel subsidies were $2235B in that year. Your [1] link says "Renewable Energy Still Dominates Energy Subsidies in FY 2022" and "traditional fuels (coal, natural gas, oil and nuclear) received just 15 percent of all subsidies between FY 2016 and FY 2022", so the two numbers you've given are clearly counting very different things.

I'm referring to Jimmy Carter's policies that helped kick start solar research prior to the baton being passed off to private industry post a viability threshold being surpassed.

That's mostly "implicit subsidies, which are costs like negative health impacts and environmental degradation that are borne by society"

On top of that the very same oil industry pocketing the 757B does lobbying and propaganda "renewables don't work yadda yadda".

We are all likely complicit. When gas prices go up people lose their shit so politicians try not to let that happen thus massive subsidies. Plus it's strategically important.

[dead]

Related to overbuilding, vertically mounted solar panels can help flatten the generation curve during the day, and may perform better than "optimally tilted" panels on winter, especially where snow might otherwise be a problem.

This isn't going to happen simply because it would introduce enormous strategic vulnerabilities. The first act ina war would be to sever an opponent's grid connections to their neighbors because that would massively erode their ability to maintain an orderly civil society.

We would need impractically high voltages to minimize power loss over long distances.

Maybe something like microwave transmission or cheap superconductors will solve it.

Regional grids are connected via tie-lines, and I heard international grids are also starting to become more connected in this way too. Though, I'd imagine it's complicated to send power from one side of the planet to the other. For starters grids can have different frequencies that need to be converted between. Also all transmission lines are subject to loss factors. In addition all the intermediary transmission companies have to route the power and avoid congestion on their grids, Then you have deal with all the financial settlement of the wheeling charges, which if you have to go through multiple grids and multiple currencies sounds like fun to deal with.

My understanding of the intentions of connecting international grids is for things like emergency supply of electricity to a different grid to stabilise the frequency and prevent blackouts.

Do we have good enough conductors for that?

Sorry I should have used the word "inexpensive" I was not referring to the quality, I was referring to the price. I own many Chinese built panels.

They say with a straight face as they tout the merits of "Beautiful Clean Coal." This administration man...what's there left to say?

I keep hearing this argument (that China does not care about climate change or the environment so it must be doing it for other reasons) but I just don't understand it. Why would you think they don't care about these things?

The Chinese leadership understands several things very clearly:

- The country has experienced multiple catastrophic natural disasters in the past.

- Such disasters often lead to regime change (losing the mandate of heaven via natural disasters leading to social unrest)

- The leadership is comprised of smart people (and a lot of engineers) and they don't play dumb political games like denying the reality of climate change.

- Climate change will bring far worse problems in future, which threatens the country's economic growth and therefore their hold on power.

So they have massive incentive to care about the reality of climate change and do everything they can to mitigate it and protect their environment.

Maybe China wants to "save the world", in at least as much as they literally run into problems with smog and pollution locally and would like to reduce that pollution for practical reasons, as well as some prestige, especially now that the US is having a hissy fit on the global stage.

But none of that matters, China would pursue massive solar power infrastructure regardless, because they want energy independence. Stupid amounts of solar power means they will no longer be importing lots of oil and fuel, and that means they would be less vulnerable to the US blockading them in some sort of conflict, which is one of their primary geopolitical concerns.

They would do this even if solar power was dramatically less effective or was significantly more expensive, because solar power is the first kind of power generation that it is economical to way overbuild, and have serious redundancy and surplus and excess, because there's no consumables that scale your running costs like if you tried to build massive amounts of coal power plants.

China would like to have that kind of scale for power because they can use it to subsidize things like datacenters running less efficient Chinese made computer components. The fact that power doesn't have to run a profit in China helps this.

The US should be taking fucking notes, about how nationalized infrastructure can be a force multiplier economically, and how infrastructure that doesn't have to be profitable can be even more powerful.

Slaving ourselves to the enrichment of well connected capital owners is harming our country, and preventing a literal energy revolution. We have the option to, for the first time in human history, actually have energy resources that are too cheap to meter.

China also invests in solar/alternative energy because they still import a lot of coal from many other countries (some of which are aligned with the US) and that is something that could be leveraged in case of conflict.

Therefore reaching self sufficiency in terms of power generation will make this threat less relevant and an enemy will no be able to use it to make them back off.

Seems like every 2nd post on HN, regardless of the actual content, becomes an argument between advocates for the US and China. In the case of China it's particularly egregious as they get to use US platforms to push their cause, whilst China blocks all foreign foreign access their own platforms. It's tiresome.

You're rationalizing slavery. That kind of nihilistic apathy is never useful.

i have a question for dang.

If I was to post a comment that frames the armenian or rohingya genocide, or indeed any genocide, in a good light, would my comment be flagged? What exactly is HN policy on moderating genocide-washing propaganda?

asking for a chinese friend

Sure. Slavery is freedom.