I love this part of the article because it does a really good job at explaining some things about energy production and usage. Energy is one thing, but how useful it is another. It's very tempting...
Scientists call electricity produced this way “work energy,” as opposed to “heat energy,” which comes from burning wood or fossil fuels, and it is a far more efficient way of getting things done. As a report published last fall by the Rocky Mountain Institute explains, “Burning gas to light a room creates more heat than light. Burning coal to create electricity creates more heat than electricity. Burning oil to move a vehicle creates more heat than motion. We are sending more energy up smokestacks and out exhaust pipes than we are putting to work to power our economy.” This is not hyperbole: burning oil to power a car or burning coal to produce electricity is at best slightly more than thirty per cent efficient—or seventy per cent inefficient. For that reason, it takes two to three times more energy to run a standard car than to run an E.V., which is why even an E.V. charged with power from a coal-fired plant is still far more efficient than a vehicle run on an internal-combustion engine.
I love this part of the article because it does a really good job at explaining some things about energy production and usage. Energy is one thing, but how useful it is another. It's very tempting for someone with a technical background to not try and cut corners and talk about entropy and whatnot, which becomes more difficult to understand for most people fast. The author prevented becoming to technical here while explaining the core part really well!
All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.
This is something that I'm looking forward too myself, a lot. While there are some products that oil and gas is likely to hang on to for quite a bit it is, in the end, a big blow to some people who had and has no issue to earn money and power over the suffering and even deaths of others.
It is unfortunately unlikely that we'll see an international tribunal for the worst offenders, but even so. It's one of the things that give me hope. Not despite, but especially because it continues to happen when so many dark things are going on.
Much of the story in this New Yorker article is familiar, but here are some tidbits I hadn't seen before:
The Pakistan example is perhaps the most dramatic. As 2024 began, demand for electricity on the national grid started falling—not because the economy was in decline but because (as careful scrutiny of images on Google Earth revealed) so many Pakistanis were putting up solar panels. As one Lahore-area corn farmer, Mohammad Murtaza, told Bloomberg, pointing to his own photovoltaic array, “I have never seen such a big change in farming. Ninety-five percent of farmland has switched to solar in this area.” Many farmers can’t afford metal mounting brackets for the panels, which are more expensive than the panels themselves, so they just lay the panels on the ground, cells to the sun.
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Last summer, Joel Nana, a Capetown-based energy analyst, was struggling, as the Pakistan-watchers had been six months earlier, to understand new data. “In Namibia, we’ve uncovered that people have built about seventy megawatts of distributed generation, mostly rooftop solar—that’s the equivalent of about fifteen per cent of the country’s peak demand. In Eswatini, which is a very small country, it’s about eleven per cent of peak demand,” he told me. In South Africa, the continent’s economic colossus, small-scale solar now provides, by his reckoning, nearly a fifth the capacity of the national grid. “You won’t see these numbers anywhere,” Nana said. In Namibia and Eswatini, “they’re not reported in national plans—no one knows about them. It’s only when you speak to the utilities. And, in fact, the numbers could be much higher, because the smallest systems aren’t reporting to anyone, not even the utilities.”
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A report from the Rocky Mountain Institute predicted that by 2050 we will have done all the mining we’ll need to do for battery minerals; after that, we’ll just recycle them, over and over again.
That seems an unlikely claim—even the best recycling systems currently recover only about ninety-five per cent of the minerals—but with each passing year we learn to build batteries with less lithium, less cobalt, and less nickel, and solar panels with less silver. Improving that efficiency by six to ten per cent a decade is enough to offset the recycling losses, and we’re doing far better than that already.
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As Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist and a senior researcher at Oxford University, calculated recently, “the silver used in one solar panel built in 2010 would be enough for around five panels today.” By 2035 or so, when my oldest panels may have started to go out of service, the minerals that each contains will almost certainly be enough for ten new panels.
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In April, researchers at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences noted that all the corn grown for ethanol in the U.S. takes up about thirty million acres, an area roughly the size of New York State. If forty-six per cent of that land were converted to producing solar energy, they found, it would generate enough electricity for the U.S. to decarbonize its system by 2050.
I love this part of the article because it does a really good job at explaining some things about energy production and usage. Energy is one thing, but how useful it is another. It's very tempting for someone with a technical background to not try and cut corners and talk about entropy and whatnot, which becomes more difficult to understand for most people fast. The author prevented becoming to technical here while explaining the core part really well!
This is something that I'm looking forward too myself, a lot. While there are some products that oil and gas is likely to hang on to for quite a bit it is, in the end, a big blow to some people who had and has no issue to earn money and power over the suffering and even deaths of others.
It is unfortunately unlikely that we'll see an international tribunal for the worst offenders, but even so. It's one of the things that give me hope. Not despite, but especially because it continues to happen when so many dark things are going on.
https://archive.is/lv3eU
Much of the story in this New Yorker article is familiar, but here are some tidbits I hadn't seen before:
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