Comment by stavros
5 hours ago
Stop focusing on energy usage and start focusing on energy generation. It doesn't matter how much energy we consume if it comes from renewables.
5 hours ago
Stop focusing on energy usage and start focusing on energy generation. It doesn't matter how much energy we consume if it comes from renewables.
Which is why we have just paid billions of dollars to cancel a renewable power project. And are imposing extra fees on cars that can be driven on renewable energy.
So, now I'm focused. I'm very focused.
> we
Maybe America, not many countries on earth, especially in Asia which are full steam ahead on renewables, pun intended.
OP did not say this is what we were doing. Said this is what we should do.
What we are doing is attempting to hold back progress on generation while subsidizing demand, which is literally the absolute dumbest possible thing.
Unless you are the fossil fuel industry. Then it’s great.
It's also great if boiling the planet is your actual goal.
I wouldn't have thought that it would be so popular, but apparently it is, and people can't get t done fast enough.
I'm kind of a misanthrope so philosophically I'm good with working on wiping ourselves out. The fact that we're doing it in the dumbest possible way should feel poetic. Instead it's just kind of embarrassing.
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It does matter because of the side effects (pollution, etc.). The environment and how it affects humanity is a complex system with many variables. Both generation and consumption are in there.
We're talking about global warming specifically here, though. Cars and planes should be a much bigger worry than AI power usage.
Not when AI is directly resulting in increased greenhouse gas pollution. It's all of the above. Any source of greenhouse gas pollution is bad. Cars, planes, ships, AI data centers running on fossil fuel energy. It's all bad.
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There's an easy 19th century solution to cars and planes - public transport. It could reduce the usage significantly, save people lots of time, reduce pollution, make people healthier through making the environment more walkable, reduce crime. We don't do it not because the technology isn't there, but because it's more profitable for people to induce consumption by planning our cities and suburbs around cars.
There's lots of rotting low hanging fruits ignored for decades because politicians are paid by the ladder-sellers.
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Renewables are not without impact. We shouldn't consume mindlessly just because we might eliminate fossil fuels some day.
What good does PV generated energy make if all that energy is used to generate heat and evaporating water?
Those are less of a problem. The heat was coming from the sun anyway. The water condenses out, so long as you haven't also increased the overall temperature in other ways.
The CO2, by contrast, is the gift that keeps on giving. It absorbs extra heat every day and hangs onto it. It doesn't condense or break down.
If that PV went to displacing sources of greenhouse gas, it would be a benefit. If all it's doing is running the plagiarism machine while we burn more and more "clean" coal, then we are in deep, deep trouble.
Not all heat from the sun stays in the atmosphere though. How much does photovoltaic impact albedo and radiance through the atmosphere compared to natural landscapes? Of course that's infinitely better than GHG emissions and we have a lot of opportunity to put PV over asphalt and such, but it should give us pause in the pursuit of more and more consumption.
That’s what solar energy does when it hits the ground or the oceans. It turns into heat or evaporated water. The latter is why it rains.
Harnessing it and piping it through extra steps only to end up as heat does nothing to the planet’s heat balance. All human energy use is tiny compared to total global solar flux. Like not even 1%.
The data center water issue is a municipal management problem. The problem is that evaporative cooling is cheaper. If data centers are using too much water to the point that it’s causing problems for homes or agriculture, it means they are not being charged enough for that water. Charge them more and they will suddenly shift toward more closed loop cooling.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008EO28...
Waste heat from human energy use is a real problem, it does influence Earth's temperature, minimally for now, but it will only grow. And it will be MUCH harder to solve than global warming.
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It does matter because for now renewables are manufactured mostly with coal and oil
EDIT: I'm not a renewable skeptic, answers bellow
All of the cradle-to-grave studies I've seen about greenhouse gas emissions for renewables versus coal/oil still indicate massive improvements.
This government meta study of 3,000 such studies puts PV solar at roughly 20x less emissions than coal.
https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy21osti/80580.pdf
Yes, but you're missing the point, I'm not debating that. Renewables aren't free, we should care about consumption just as much as production, and we don't know (yet) how to sustain the current consumption with renewables only, that includes being able to manufacture renewables.
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This doesn’t matter that much. Solar and batteries will last for decades with minimal maintenance and no input.
Any kind of fossil fuel generation means constantly going out and digging up new oil sources, shipping them around the world, and then burning them. So you invest a lot of time & money into something that disappears immediately and also heats up the environment.
Meanwhile, a solar panel just sits there for decades passively making energy with very few externalities.
Not to mention, recycling solar panels & batteries is getting cheaper & more effective by the day. The metal (and even oil!) you dug out of the ground to build them didn’t get burned up; a lot of it is still usable.
Imagine if all the vehicles that run of fossil fules is converted into EV. What are the incentives in place to properly recycle the batteries? Does a new battery technology go into production before the technology to recycle it is production grade/economically viable? What happens when we are getting like a million EV batteries, globally per day, to dispose off? What happens when these batteries use vastly different chemical composition (because they are from various stages of battery evolution) and need vastly different methods to process? What happens when these things pile up and poison the land? dumped in ocean or rivers? burned up releasing god-knows-what into air?
How long before the regulation (often times toothless) kicks in to handle these things?
I am all for getting rid of pollution, but there should be some caution in rushing onto new things, which is exactly what got us into this mess in the first place.
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Everything you wrote is plain obvious to anyone who looked into the topic. But come on, we don't have to change anything about our consumption because we'll eventually reach some solar punk utopia? That's the comment I was replying to.
Nothing for now tells us we can power our current needs with renewables only, however we know we can drive around in much lighter vehicles, fly much less, eat more local, buy less clothes, use compute for less stupid things in data centers.
They're manufactured once and then generate way more energy than was used to make them.
Of course, but pretending consumption doesn't matter in that situation is just silly
Which is a tiny CO2 spend compared to the benefit, unless you dishonestly factor in manufacturing energy costs as coming from oil.