Comment by crimsonnoodle58
8 hours ago
To be fair on fossil fuels, they are simply stored energy from the sun. You can think of them like a dense battery, more dense than our current battery technology allows.
8 hours ago
To be fair on fossil fuels, they are simply stored energy from the sun. You can think of them like a dense battery, more dense than our current battery technology allows.
Sure, though there’s a difference between extracting energy stored for millions of years and capturing the continuous flow of energy from the sun.
> Sure, though there’s a difference between extracting energy stored for millions of years and capturing the continuous flow of energy from the sun.
The former is actually continuous, and thus far more reliable. The latter requires coming up with some other storage mechanism. Granted, we have ways to do this already. But it's still not a trivial project.
A dense battery with recharge time measured in millions of years? Be careful how quickly you discharge!
The availability of such large amounts of energy just delays our actions to make our energy use more efficient. We burn liters of gasoline to move a single person a few kilometers. This is not efficient and only made possible by fossil fuel energy abundance (for now, it's borrowed time).
vs
I think the choice is clear.
'Density' is not the concern we all have about fossil fuels. It's the effects on the atmosphere.
Density is the concern we all have for solar.
Solar is so diffuse, just bringing it to where people need it has doubled the price purely in transmission infrastructure costs.
Reference: Australia - the place that’s supposed to be solar’s poster child has more than doubled electricity prices in the last three to four years because, unsurprisingly (we were warned), getting solar and wind to where they’re needed turns out to be incredibly expensive.
I believe gp was saying that density is an advantage for fossil fuels. Nobody thinks it’s a disadvantage/problem for fossil fuels.