We Need an Energy Miracle (2015)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/we-need-an-energy-miracle/407881/?single_page=true

by pidge • 9 years ago

33 59 9 years ago

"There are many people working on storage—batteries are a form of storage, and there’s a few others, like compressed air, hot metals. But it’s not at all clear that we will get grid-scale economic storage."

Grid-scale storage is the key. Duke Energy is one of the leaders in this effort, at least among the major utilities [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307767

noncoml3• 9 years ago

All this cryptocurrenty craziness doesn't help either.

I don't understand how the HN crowd that is usually so pro-environment, is also happy with the tons of wasted energy from crytptocurrency mining.

Caveman_Coder4• 9 years ago

The whole crypto-currency scene is increasingly seeming like a huge Ponzi scheme. I really wonder at what point popular opinion will no longer support wasting electrical power on mining a digital currency.

QAPereo3• 9 years ago

When the music stops, and hope of striking it rich dies...people are greedy and shortsighted in the aggregate.

jimmaswell• 9 years ago

If the energy comes from a source where gathering and expending it doesn't have any adverse environmental effects then it's hard to say using it is "wasteful" - the only real problem comes if you assume using more power means more coal is burned and the like. Heavy coin mining tends to be done around the cheapest energy sources like hydro, and in the interim before burning fossil fuels is fully phased out I don't think the additional use from coin mining is going to be that big of a deal compared to people using inefficient air conditioner setups, heating their homes with electric too much, leaving all the lights and the TV on when they go out, or a bunch of other things that can add up to the additional power miners use.

llukas2• 9 years ago

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

I beg to differ - currently just Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as country of Iceland - anything consuming energy on a scale of entire country (even small one yes) is environmentally significant.

mikeash• 9 years ago

Cheap energy sources like hydro are usually connected to a grid, so that electricity could be used to reduce fossil fuel demand elsewhere if it wasn’t being used for mining.

imglorp• 9 years ago

Filecoin is another proof of work that doesn't involve burning cpu cycles.

melling5• 9 years ago

You derailed the entire point of the article by taking a tangent into a completely different, essentially irrrelevant, discussion.

“Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption 0.09%“

How about Bill Gates and Terrapower trying to build a new generation of nuclear power in China?

https://qz.com/627113/bill-gates-says-china-is-the-best-plac...

Caveman_Coder4• 9 years ago

TerraPower is interesting, especially since it recycles previously enriched uranium. On a side note, as far as the future of nuclear power goes, I'm more interested in LFTR designs and I think Flibe Energy is going to someone to watch here in the near future.

http://flibe-energy.com/

zedadex• 9 years ago

I don't understand how the HN crowd that is usually so pro-environment, is also happy with the tons of wasted energy from crytptocurrency mining

Iirc that's one of the points of proof-of-stake. PoS is nearly analogous to PoW in its platform implications - potential for centralization due to resource costs and so on - but doesn't rely on burning through processing power to be secured.

hughw• 9 years ago

Paul Sztorc argues that PoS will burn as much electricity as PoW [1]. Buterin answers here [2].

[1] http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/

[2] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doe...

openfuture• 9 years ago

It's still young technology and the energy efficiency will improve with the lightning network or proof of stake or different concepts like filecoin.

The societal gain from these technologies is potentially very large and will hopefully realign interests in the direction of saving the environment rather than bailing out businesses.. But the most sane definition of money is actually energy imo

Also comparing the energy cost of printing physical money with mining cryptocurrencies is favorable to CC's iirc.

layoric2• 9 years ago

Also comparing the energy cost of printing physical money with mining cryptocurrencies is favorable to CC's iirc.

Really? Last I checked, taking the averaged of the top 10 most efficient mining setups, BitCoin network was pulling 9GW+.

https://twitter.com/layoric/status/906087502414352384

Another model here showing 18 TWh annual usage, that's still an insane amount of power.

https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption

Proof of Work (and BitCoin in particular) is so damaging, really hoping another currency takes over that doesn't use so much power for 4 transactions per second..

rtpg• 9 years ago

Right now a single transaction on the bitcoin network uses as much energy as powering 7 homes for a day.

There's infrastructure costs, but Visa's network doesn't need that much to process a single POST request

TeMPOraL• 9 years ago

As I keep pointing out, energy costs of "classical" money is considered an upkeep that's to be reduced. You can earn money by making the process more efficient. In cryptocurrencies, energy use is considered a feature - people are incentivized to waste more and more electricity.

Or put differently, it's replacing a system that's O(log n) with respect to energy usage with a system that's O(n²), for questionable benefits.

glibgil• 9 years ago

Mining is a placeholder for the real resource which is useful computation. There will be an economy based on distributed electricity and distributed computation eventually

eip2• 9 years ago

The military has been suppressing advanced energy tech for 70+ years in order to maintain the stability of the global financial (slavery) system.

Decentralized energy production means loss of control.

alexasmyths2• 9 years ago

The military, particularly DARPA has been introducing tech into the world that has utterly improved it for the better.

If I could be so bold: every piece of tech in your house depends in some way on military R&D.

Heyzeus - you even owe 'canned food' to Napoleon's supply-chain R&D.

It's a surprisingly long list when you account for actual history, not just the 20th century, which was huge.

eip2• 9 years ago

I never claimed otherwise. They have unlimited R&D budget and the ability to kidnap scientists/inventors and steal their tech. They release tons of goodies all the time. Just not advanced energy tech.

There are two reasons for this:

1. The stability of the petrodollar global control grid is based on the centralized production of energy. Any tech that would lead to widespread decentralization is a threat. Power is power.

2. People are too retarded and selfish to be trusted with unlimited energy. They would inevitably split the crust of the earth and kill us all.

So until both of those things change you won't see permanent batteries, cheap hydrogen from water, high efficiency solar, or any of the other energy tech they are sitting on.

alexasmyths2• 9 years ago

There are no miracles in tech.

We usually see things coming a long way off. We were burning coal just like wood - and the entire hydrocarbon industry is a big refinement on 'coal fires'.

Nuclear Energy has been vastly understudied in the last 30 years. There are so many opportunities there, and the 'yield' is earth-shaking: 1000 years of electricity.

Yes - I'm aware of the issues, but with the right approach, most of them, possibly all of them can be mitigated.

Just with '1980's tech' - and some institutional responsibility (A big 'ask', I know) - we could wipe out climate change for a hefty, but not unreasonable price tag. (FYI - a huge new component factored into costs is 'insurance' for these plants, which is crazy expensive and hard to assess - in addition to improvements - we can legislate and plan around these things).

At very least - we should be investing in research both in tech, but also in operating modalities. The upside is too great to ignore.

Animats• 9 years ago

And we got it. Wind power works, is cost effective, and scales well. Solar power works, is cost effective, and scales well. Battery storage works, is starting to be cost effective, and scales well. Fracking works, too, until that level of reserves runs out.

Energy has moved down the priority list of problems.

That-one-thing2• 9 years ago

No, now I have trouble finding English sources and I need to go in a while.

But no wind power does not work in large scale in a electric system. The problem is that you need to have a lot of extra power and power electronics to stabilize the effect of wind power. It disturbs the frequency of the electricity in the network and you have to balance it with other sources you have complete control over to keep the power stable.

When the Swedish energy department made a study they found that we can't have more than 10 TWh of wind power (7%)[0]. There is one study from one group that says that we can have up to 30 TWh (21%)[2], but if we are realistic it's probably in the middle. This is things my professors in wind power told us, and they really like wind power.

Sorry the sources are in Swedish, but I really advice you to look into the subject before calming that it's all perfect.

[0] http://www.svk.se/siteassets/om-oss/rapporter/20130313-integ...

[1]http://fof.se/tidning/2012/7/tal-elnatet-mer-vindkraft Lennart Söders forskargrupp.

ZeroGravitas2• 9 years ago

Sweden has had more than 7% wind for a few years now, so we can safely say it's higher than 7%.

There's actually a single giant windfarm due for completion in 2020 that on its own will provide more than 8%.

There are some reasons to think solar and wind have physical limits and can't provide 100% on their own (or even together) economically just as nuclear on its own doesn't really make economic sense, but there's a long history of groups predicting false limits based on strange assumptions.

tonyedgecombe• 9 years ago

Yet the UK peaked at 27% earlier this year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/06/07/uk-sets-new-r...

nickhalfasleep• 9 years ago

I wonder if storage could be offset with sufficient grid ties. Power could be shared across the day/night side of the planet, from a sufficient number of areas to avoid 100% cloud cover.

davedx• 9 years ago

Yes, these are already being built. Interconnects are a large part of the energy transition. In addition to day/night connections, there is also a plan to connect desert regions of Tunisia to Europe via an undersea link, to take advantage of CSP plants that will be built there.

Interconnections reduce the effects of renewable variability.

ZeroGravitas2• 9 years ago

The miracle will be society not being run by vested interests who maintain dirty expensive energy sources for their own narrow benefit.

Personally, I've found Gates's public pronouncements unhelpful as they've promoted this idea that the current tech is of no use when simple things like replacing coal with natural gas can have large impacts.

jmnicolas• 9 years ago

Since we probably won't get an energy miracle, the sad truth is what we "need" is an economic collapse that will set us back decades (centuries even).

lozenge• 9 years ago

A response: https://thinkprogress.org/no-bill-gates-we-dont-need-energy-...

What is particularly unfortunate about Gates’ mistaken rhetoric is that it can disempower people and policymakers and pundits into thinking that individual or even government action is not the central weapon needed to win the climate fight and that our only hope is some long-term deus ex machina strategy to avoid catastrophic warming. Nothing could be worse than leaving people with the impression that humanity’s only hope is future miracles...
What is particularly ironic about Gates’ mistaken energy-miracle-centered strategy, as I’ll discuss at the end, is that it is the exact opposite of the deployment-driven innovation strategy Gates himself used to make Microsoft a software giant and to make personal computers the “miracle” that Gates calls them today.

We Need an Energy Miracle (2015)

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