How about I look at actual unions in software, like the NYT tech union that immediately started undermining merit, making illegal demands, and discouraging high performance.
Every actual tech union that exists is a great advertisement for not unionizing.
Would also note that sports' (and Hollywood's, to a lesser degree) models rely on tightly controlling distribution to a near-monopoly degree. Which, as it happens, describes big tech to a tee.
> Your entire focus here is compensation, which wasn’t my focus in everything I listed.
It wasn't your focus in everything you listed, but it was in two out of the four of them... which certainly isn't nothing:
> - Top performers won’t be rewarded based on merit anymore because everything becomes about the collective.
> - The incentives for engineers who want to go above and beyond will disappear, because compensation, and everything else, becomes standardized. Instead of an environment where you can negotiate and prove your value, it becomes about fitting into a collective agreement. Hard work and unique contributions should mean something, but they won’t in such an environment.
What was the #1 argument against WFH before COVID? It was fear of productivity drop, that the company simply can't function with WFH. Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH. At this point, it shouldn't be called RTO, it should be called STO (Switch To Office), because WFH is the default existing state. And the companies that want to STO, they admit there's NO DATA to support this:
The hypocrisy is obvious, they were all so against WFH before COVID, demanding data that it would work. Now it's working fine for three years, and yet they switch to office with no data, a simple "gut feeling" argument. It's indeed bullshit.
> Then COVID happened and companies worked fine for three years with WFH.
I don't think we have good data on that "worked fine" part. Personally I saw a significant degradation of our team performance during COVID remote.
Some people slacked a lot (difficult to catch, though), many people worked hard (perhaps even harder than in office), but the bad communication reduced the overall team productivity a lot.
Where's the data? Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH. They stubbornly said the status quo of in-office was enough and no further discussion was allowed.
Now where's the data to change the status quo from WFH to the office? Amazon admits they have none. If the other companies forcing in-office had data they would be shouting it as much as they could, but when asked for data, it's just silence. Companies have had record profits and quarters with WFH, so clearly the financial data shows no issues with WFH.
Again where's the data? All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
> Before COVID, there were plenty of anecdotes from remote companies about how it helped their hiring and productivity, but that wasn't enough to convince the vast majority of companies to try WFH.
I think there's a bit of a selection bias. I believe many people can work effectively remotely and these likely applied to remote companies. But many people are less effective remote and these wouldn't succeed in remote companies. In the end I certainly think there's a space for remote only companies, but I'm not sure if it's a model useful for the whole IT sector.
> All we hear are anecdotes, that wasn't good enough to change the status quo before COVID, why should it be enough now to change the status quo away from WFH?
In the end it doesn't matter. It's the managers calling the shots and carrying the responsibility. If their guts tell them office work is the right direction, it's their bet.
Talking to lots of middle and upper management, the primary complaints I hear are hard to measure - poorer communication, less alignment, less innovation, etc. None of this reduces the number of tasks being done, but reduces the utility of those tasks. Measuring directly is hard, but ultimately you'd expect it result in lower growth - which many companies are seeing (but it's hard to disentangle this from the macro situation).
I think the hard reality is that companies need to make a thesis on the level of flexibility in remote/in-office work and commit, then 5 years from now we'll get an idea of what works well.
* Less sick employees since they don't spread their germs in an office
* Much lower attrition and retention of institutional knowledge
* Lower rent costs or possibly zero rent costs for office (actually this one is very easy to measure)
* Able to hire from outside local metro area
None of these was enough to move companies even an inch towards WFH pre-COVID. And yet now vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations is enough to shift everything back to in-office?
Pre-pandemic, why would you risk testing out an unknown style of work and management that almost no one had experience with?
Now there's a significant portion of the labor market that expects WFH, companies need to produce a policy on WFH/RTO instead of treating it as a non-decision.
Data gives no clear insight into which is better, which makes this a judgment call, and everyone with >5 yoe has enough experience in both modes that they feel qualified to make that judgment. Many think requiring some in-office time is superior. You can try and dismiss those opinions as "vague issues due to lack of water cooler conversations" but that's not going to actually convince anyone with the power to effect these decisions - even if you're right! You need answers to concerns like "virtual communication is too low bandwidth to build alignment on strategic shifts that are necessary for the company to grow to profitability" (quote to me from a director at a company with >1,000 employees).
My argument is basically: if you could have addressed those concerns, it would've happened during the pandemic. Manifestly, those concerns were not addressed in a satisfactory way. Therefore the only real resolution now is to wait 5-10 years to see if RTO/WFH is a meaningful differentiator for companies.
Wouldnt it be more likely that current Middle management isn’t familiar enough with a chat environments to maintain team cohesion.
I worked as a volunteer in an online team before the COVID years. I was FAR better at ensuring a team was cohesive online, than I was in person. You can make out whats going on based on how people talk, you can have one on ones, and diagnose issues.
"Far less noticed was a revised version of their paper, published in May by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The boost to efficiency had instead become a 4% decline."
This line from the article "...in the number of calls handled per hour by employees of an online retailer that had shifted from offices to homes.." shows that this study is about a call center. A few points on this:
* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
>* Here's another article from 2014 that showed a 13.5% increase at a different call center https://hbr.org/2014/01/to-raise-productivity-let-more-emplo... So study vs study, which one is correct or better? This isn't good evidence either way for software engineers.
1. The article in question cites 5 other studies that also found negative results for remote work.
2. The Ctrip study mentioned in your hbr.org link is probably the Trip.com study mentioned in the economist article. The article mentions issues with that study:
"Call-centre workers for a Chinese online travel agency now known as Trip.com increased their performance by 13% when remote—a figure that continues to appear in media coverage today. But two big wrinkles are often neglected: first, more than two-thirds of the improved performance came from employees working longer hours, not more efficiently; second, the Chinese firm eventually halted remote work because off-site employees struggled to get promoted. In 2022 Dr Bloom visited Trip.com again, this time to investigate the effects of a hybrid-working trial. The outcomes of this experiment were less striking: it had a negligible impact on productivity, though workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office."
>* The discussion here is about tech workers, not call center employees
>The data and evidence we need is from the loud RTO companies (Google, Amazon, etc.) in the software industry pushing for RTO. These supposedly heavily data and metrics driven organizations have NO DATA supporting their RTO efforts. Some random study about call centers is irrelevant here.
1. Some data is no data. Sure, maybe doing the study with office workers will show different results, but until then assuming the positive unless there's evidence to the contrary is just intellectually dishonest.
2. Call center productivity is far easier to objectively measure than tech workers. Given issues above with studies on call center workers, I suspect that even if there were a study showing negative results for tech workers, there's going to be some many ways you can wriggle yourself out of that one that it's not going to meaningfully change the conversation.
Not saying that you're wrong, but I'm interested in how you're able to measure "overall team productivity." I've found that to be a near-impossibility at any organization that I've worked at.
For many people it’s really just a gut feeling. That’s the issue with this debate; there isn’t really any data on either side of the aisle. Regardless, team productivity is both more important, and easier to measure than individual productivity; and most proponents of remote work are only focused on the latter.
Isn't bad communication a management issue, not a team performance issue?
Some articles have pointed out that the major driver (from executives) to return to office is simply underperforming real estate investments. In short, the attrition, decreases in performance and morale, and environmental impacts are simply not worth the massive losses that would be incurred from the innumerable empty office parks.
And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?
And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them? "Easy communication" can be a double-edged sword, and Slack/Discord/email can be silenced for specified periods of time.
> And how may of those people slacked a lot in the office, and you just never knew because they were good at looking busy whenever anyone was nearby?
Some of them sure, but I believe less so. In my opinion, most slacking is not a result of very intentional attempts, but more of an environment / opportunity enabling it.
> And how many people were much more productive because other people didn't keep popping over their cubicle walls and interrupting them?
My intuition is that the trade-off is worth it. Larger projects lose the most productivity on information-sharing issues. Wrong things are being worked on, with focus on wrong aspects, which then again creates more useless work. Things are being reworked constantly because of wrong assumptions, people not reading miles long specs and thus missing or misinterpreting some details. People talking to each other frequently is IMHO critical for the success of the bigger organizations.
Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
> Sometimes you need uninterrupted time for deep thinking, but that's in my experience a smaller part of the work. In such cases I either go to meeting rooms or home.
That's great until you are forced to come in on "anchor days" and there are no free meeting rooms left.
I say this out here whenever this comes up…but if we are truly being honest there really is no hard data out there to support that WFH benefits the organization. All of the arguments and anecdotes I hear are specific to the individual. If you can’t support your argument with data against the people who get to make the decisions where you work, you can’t really blame them for going back to a historical work environment that made them successful in the first place.
I always caveat this idea with the fact that I love WFH and do not want to RTO, but I can’t make an argument why it’s better for my organization.
Don't know about Amazon, for all I know about their disfunction they could be actually running the company without any performance statistics. But, say, Goldman definitely has these statistic since they pay bonuses based on them and it is pretty aggressive in RTO. I imagine Amazon has statistics too but they just don't want to publish them, afraid (rightfully so, IMHO) of what that will do to their stock price.
Disregarding data from one of the most profitable companies in the world just to ply an argument that makes no sense in the context and disqualifies based on an entirely fabricated and unmeasurable dimension — that’s called:
Sorry, I don't follow. The GP said that Amazon has no data and I argued that they probably have but don't want to publish it. But even if you are arguing against the GP your bringing up "No true Scotsman" makes no sense in this context.
Amazon has no data to prove that rto is effective and have admitted it was a gut feeling — thats a data point to the point further up the thread about “companies willing sacrifice productivity for control”
So yes that is a data point: Amazon can’t find data saying their workforce was more effective in the office.
You employ no true Scotsman by discarding g this data point and saying “they don’t matter because I suspect they are in productivity trouble”
Which has no basis in reality as the CEO just admitted they could not find data to support that point — otherwise they would say “people are more productive in the office based on our studies.” Your refutation is a no true Scotsman under the sense of invalidly discarding the counter example given based on your suspicion which is actually disproved by the comments of the CEO himself.
Also Goldman Sachs has maintained a buy position on Amazon for this entire time — so your suspiscion about Amazon being unstable and Goldman being stable doesn’t really hold water.
There is no evidence that Amazon has no data showing decreased productivity during WFH period. The statement from the management is carefully worded so Amazon won't get smacked by SEC for misrepresentation: the stated "gut feeling" is about the RTO mandate, not about the productivity metrics. Amazon having or lacking performance statistics is a speculation, the CEO hasn't proved or disproved anything. But even if we agreed that, indeed, Amazon not having performance data is a fact, how is it "True Scotsman" again? Bringing up a counterexample against a claim "All companies have no data and do RTO out of spite!" only appears as a fallacy to you because you might be emotionally invested in this. A counterexample is is the proper way to refute a false assertion like that.
"True Scotsman" is, in fact, a fallacy of trying to invalidate a counterexample, interesting that you brought it up.
Your misrepresentations of my argument and assumptions about my feelings aside the no true Scotsman is this in quotes:
“Don't know about Amazon, for all I know about their disfunction they could be actually running the company without any performance statistics.”
The counter example you are discarding is the fact that the Amazon ceo said that it was simply a gut feeling and not based on any data and they are a successful company who is willing to do rto based on control with no consideration for productivity (all of your speculation aside those are the facts we have to work with). You are trying to disqualify this data point based on your assumption that something is wrong with the company and no “non dysfunctional” (or no true company) would allow wfh. You then point to Goldman Sachs as a “true” company that did rto and should therefore be considered in place of Amazon. This assumption is not supported by your example (Goldman sachs) which actually has research supporting the opposite but that’s beside the point of you attempting to protect the assertion (companies will not do rto for purely aesthetic/control purposes while it may decrease productivity) by discarding the example of Amazon which is just that: a company pursuing rto without (as far as we know) knowledge as to how it affects productivity whether negatively or positively; it was done based on a gut feeling of management.
Nice set of assumptions about someone you don’t know though, I’ll be disengaging now.
I see, you believe that the statement "Amazon goes RTO even though it has no data about productivity impact from WFH" is a counterexample to the assertion "No company does RTO despite the data showing increased productivity from WFH", this makes your arguments more rational for somebody who accepts that, indeed, Amazon having no data proves that it acted against the data (which it did not have but, I imagine, in some philosophical sense it's also "data", and if you really, really want it, that "data" also shows WFH increased productivity by the virtue of not showing the decreased productivity, even though it also does not show that e.g. not putting employees in front of a firing squad for missing some KPI bar would decreased productivity too).
You failed to capture both the meaning and actual words of my argument and the way you have re-worded it doesn’t make semantic sense so I can’t really understand what you are trying to communicate. The continued misrepresentation of my argument does not actually prove your point.
Why would I even try to capture your actual words? It's all there already, you can re-read this thread. And I definitely did not try to reword anything you say, unless now you are saying you did not claim that the Amazon is a counterexample to the https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614850 ? Well it's either that or your "True Scotsman" accusations make no sense, pick either, I don't care.
USB 2.0 is a missed opportunity for bringing Stage Manager/screen mirroring feature from iPadOS to iPhone. This is already possible with iPad and a USB A + HDMI -> USB C adapter (plug keyboard/mouse into USB A, monitor into HDMI, and USB C into iPad).
California has CCPA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac... Could this be used to force these companies to delete all personal data? It would have to be done periodically since after deletion the data would accumulate again. It seems like there's a potential business idea here of automatically sending out CCPA deletion notices to companies on a schedule. While this wouldn't stop the collection of data, regularly interrupting them with deletion requests could make storing personal data costly enough to at least reduce whatever profits they would get from it.
EDIT: Looked at a few privacy policies and the CCPA link is often hard to find. Keywords to look for: "CCPA", "California Privacy", some examples of links I found:
Something interesting I found is also this: https://www.honda.com/privacy/CCPA-Metrics which shows how many requests Honda received. It seems not many are aware of CCPA rights and this number of requests is not enough to deter companies from gathering personal information. These metrics need to be orders of magnitude higher to make a difference in company behavior. It seems like an automated service to send these requests and more public awareness of CCPA could help here.
EDIT2: A lot of these forms ask whether you're submitting the request for yourself or you're an authorized agent doing it for someone else. I found more details on "authorized agents" on the CCPA FAQ: https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa. Maybe an organization like Mozilla or EFF could setup a service where you can authorize them to do this for you? Then you could just select a checkbox of companies that you want CCPA deletion requests for and it would be sent on a regular schedule (quarterly? yearly?). If such a service became popular, it could really disrupt the personal data gathering of companies.
I was thinking about a similar idea while reading the HN discussion on NASA's Deep Space Network issues. For the Artemis moon mission, instead of wasting precious DSN bandwidth, wouldn't it be better to simply store video on a hard drive and send it back to earth? That would even allow recording in full 4k. Same for things like the James Webb telescope. The latency is certainly much higher (a few days for hard drives to return to Earth and get sent back on rockets), but it seems the orders of magnitude higher bandwidth would be worth it
People in this thread are really talking past each other. I've been to the nice Asian mega cities with great and clean subways and buses. And I've lived in the American suburbs. You can't make the American suburbs like the mega cities by just making them walkable.
Everything in a mega city works together to make transit work. Those tall buildings? They provide great shade no matter how sunny it is which is critical for walking to bus stops and subway stations. Also, the walk itself is so much more interesting, random stores to stop at and places to eat and go to. Density makes transit work.
You can't just put random stores in a suburb and make it "walkable" and expect the same thing. Just as everything in a mega city works together to make transit work, everything in a suburb works together to make cars work.
We need to give up on the mass transit solutions that work for dense cities (subways and buses) for suburbs. It's a waste of money and completely the wrong solution. It hasn't worked for decades and never will.
Shut down bus systems for suburbs and use the government funds to give out ride sharing (either Uber or government run) credits for everyone to use (low income can get more credits). That's what a suburb is designed for, point-to-point travel such as cars. And invest massively in real protected, useful bike lanes and stop trying to kill e-bikes with regulations (which a lot of cities are trying to do). e-bikes are finally a real alternative to cars in suburbs, it has just the right amount of travel speed and ease to challenge the car, but it's already under attack. Ride sharing credits and e-bikes, these are the solutions for suburbs. Stop trying to fit a square peg (buses and subways) into a round hole.
We need to stop thinking carbon chemical fuels are the problem. FOSSIL fuels are the problem, not carbon fuels itself.
We should be blanketing every inch of desert with solar. And pair it to use excess energy for carbon fuels synthesis. Reuse all the existing natural gas power plants to run on synthetic carbon fuel. Batteries are not the solution for this. It only fixes the day/night imbalance, but not the seasonal summer/winter imbalance for solar production.
But most importantly, we don't have time. We don't have time to wait for the beautiful, elegant solution of all cars EV, all power storage in batteries, all planes flying on electricity. Perfect is the enemy of good. Look at the arctic and ocean temps, we do not have time. The developing countries will not wait for the perfect nice solar and battery solution. We need to reuse as much of what we have now in a way that will make a difference for carbon output. Again, we do don't have time for the most efficient solution.
What is industry good at? Mass producing a lot of stuff. We can do that now with solar. Stop worrying about matching it to daily power usage. Just pump out those panels and get it installed everywhere. Get the excess into synthetic carbon fuel and we can quickly make a difference in carbon output.
> We should be blanketing every inch of desert with solar.
Please god, no. Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed, like rooftops and parking lots. Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles.
And I happen to think that maybe humanity should learn how to leave some things alone. Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.
I am an electrical engineer that designs control systems for renewable power production for a living.
Curious what makes you think that the overhead and inefficiencies inherent to a million small solar installs is somehow better than a single managed facility benefiting from economy of scale both for maintenance and design.
Additionally, curious how you plan to address the problem of adding additional generation to existing way overloaded distribution systems to accomplish this. If this massive hypothetical solar install is all non-grid tied then fine, I guess, but you're losing a substantial amount of the power that's made that way.
Distribution systems don't come for free and have many of the same problems as 'last mile' internet. Not terribly complex but expensive en masse, particularly in areas that are not densely populated (which is a lot of the US).
There is a reason we spend a lot of money on transmission. Spending a lot of money on distribution helps a very small part of your network. Spending a lot of money on transmission helps a huge part of your network.
Not OP but I suspect some comes from what I would view as the ability to first add solar to where there is existing infrastructure like parking lots, roofs, telephone poles etc. These areas are already built out and adding solar on top of it doesn’t take over an untouched eco system. Deserts are not voids of nothing ness and there is already a vast impact on the environment already.
In my opinion the greatest benefits for large numbers of discrete small PV installs (with battery) is in places where it's uneconomical to extend the grid.
I'll use some hard to reach parts of WA and BC and OR and ID for example. You might be able to build a nice house/cabin on a piece of rural land and find that setting the poles and running lines to bring basic 100A or 200A service to that house will cost $40,000.
For 40k you can build quite a large off grid PV system that will have a reasonable ROI on it to serve the same loads, vs. spending 40k one time on construction costs for grid and then $50 to $200 monthly electric bills recurring for a long time after that.
As far as grid tied decentralized power systems do I agree with you 100%. It is VERY COSTLY in labor and complications to do something like cover the roof of a Home Depot or similar warehouse-sized structure in grid feeding PV, as compared to doing medium-sized to massive scale ground mount PV on empty land somewhere.
Unfortunately, banks don’t finance anything “off grid” with conventional financing. There are some banks that do, but you’re going to pay a premium compared to a standard Fannie/Freddie backed mortgage.
That’s the biggest issue with this plan, which can be fine for a certain kind of person but not 90%+ of the market of potential people who inevitably have to finance a home.
It can sometimes be "good enough" to check the box for bank financing that electrical service is available at the county maintained road which is the mailbox/street address location for the property... Something with a long or difficult driveway could easily be 30-40k to extend grid service from road to house.
My uncle in Newport WA, close to the Id border and pretty isolated (although the house has electrical service now) used a solar shower for a long time. But there wasn’t actually enough sun to be off grid all that much, and unless you have running water to build a water wheel, some grid access is needed. You could probably do more with solar in scrub areas, but you might need some kind of diesel generator back up for the dark winter.
Yeah one of the big challenges with off grid at that latitude is that your december and january kWh cumulative production (per month) will really suck. It's not as bad as it used to be with panels available at $0.40 per STC watt rating.
If you go to the NREL pvwatts calculator and plug in a theoretical 20kW STC rated system at his latitude/longitude you'll find that the Dec. and Jan. production will not be very much at all.
Sometimes it can be more affordable to significantly over-size a system to product enough kwH per month in mid winter vs. spending $4000+ on a generator.
If you can get 360W 72-cell panels at $150 a piece in whole-pallet quantities, 4000 bucks buys a lot of panels... Not counting the mounting and cabling and junction box cost.
As a budgetary figure, can easily spend $4000 on a small Generac propane generator and wiring/transfer switch.
At other times it can totally make sense to have a small generator to run 2-3 hours a day in mid winter, feeding a charger that can add a constant 1500W into a battery system to keep up the battery string voltage.
> For 40k you can build quite a large off grid PV system that will have a reasonable ROI on it to serve the same loads, vs. spending 40k one time on construction costs for grid and then $50 to $200 monthly electric bills recurring for a long time after that.
Why would such an off-grid system have any monthly electric bills? Are you just pre-amortizing the cost of replacement batteries?
EDIT: I'm an idiot. The bills are for the grid-tied option.
Interconnection queues are overloaded. But most of all:
> There is a reason we spend a lot of money on transmission
This should be in the past tense. Transmission was the only option, because generation needed to be centralized to be anywhere near cost effective. And transmission is suuuuuper expensive, by far the biggest part of my solar bill.
Further, it's used ineffectively, often with capacity factors far below 30% because it's sized for peak, not for average use.
As the cost of generation gets lower and lower, the cost of transmission and distribution becomes an ever higher fraction of power costs, and the next thing to minimize.
Big transmission across the continent makes the most sense. But it's also the hardest to build. We are likely stuck repowering existing transmission to higher capactities.
Sure, we will need a lot more transmission capacity, but the less we can get away with will probably lower costs.
(And transmission is only geographic arbitrage, we will soon have time arbitrage with batteries that will rival nearly all transmission costs. Transition is not getting cheaper, but storage solar and wind are.)
> Curious what makes you think that the overhead and inefficiencies inherent to a million small solar installs is somehow better than a single managed facility benefiting from economy of scale both for maintenance and design.
Location. Deserts are far from people. 80% of people in the US live on the east half of the country (and most of these on the eastern half of that). But even the midpoint is too far from deserts to use energy from it.
My town built a solar install on undeveloped land adjacent to the airport. That's lower impact than desert and cheaper than smaller installs would have been. I'm sure there's lots of situations like that, even in areas denser than the rural Midwest.
I lived in LA. It is a desert. It'd be just fine to cover parking lots, highways, and rooftops with solar. There are at least 100 square miles of parking lots in LA.
LA actually isn’t a desert, although there is desert in the LA area. Most of LA is classified as Mediterranean, and gets enough rain (the closer to the coast, the less deserty it is). Lots of mountains make for interesting climate zones.
Fine, to be pedantic, it's right on the limit of being desert. LA averages about 15 inches of rainfall per year, whereas the classification for desert is less than 10 inches. With the amount of irrigation in the area, this is not generally acknowledged. Funny, I used to have to hop over a giant puddle in the street every morning to catch the bus to UCLA because the sprinkler systems for someone's 4ft wide lawn were just that badly misconfigured. I always thought that inane.
I spent all my time in LA living in Westwood, and saw some interesting rain storms while I was there. Interesting tidbit: Santa Monica (just next to the coast) actually gets less rain a year than LA (13.5 inches vs. 14.7 inches). I'm guessing they get more moisture in fog than in rain.
You could, with current technology, put the PV on your antipode with sufficiently small losses it's basically fine.
Actually building one is harder than designing one, so I'm not suggesting breaking ground on a global grid immediately, but if you in the USA can get past the three way split of {east, west, Texas}, that'll do a lot all by itself.
Transmission losses are a concern, but this is fairly irrelevant to the OP's original idea: that of producing carbon fuels in the desert and then transporting them. Most populated places in the US are pretty far from Erath, Louisiana or Cushing, Oklahoma, and we get by just fine under this arrangement.
High voltage direct current is the keyword. It is possible. Unfortunately the plans to build a giant solar farm in the Sahara and connect it to Europe never took off (for now). Losses are about 10% per 3000km. See also what the DESERTEC foundation does.
> Distribution systems don't come for free and have many of the same problems as 'last mile' internet.
Nor does centralized. The grid needs to be upgraded to handle the significant increase in demand. But more importantly, over-centralization will mean we're putting all our energy production in fewer baskets (than we have now). Decentralized is a form of a redundancy, a form of backup. It's also a form of independence.
There's no single silver bullet. We'd be wise to blend, and blend wisely. And yes, they might have some added financial costs, but not doing it will surely come at other costs (e.g., blackouts).
> Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles.
Rooftop residential is 2x+ times as expensive as utility scale. Lazard's well regarded annual Levelized Cost of Energy survey puts the range for utility scale at $24 - $96 MWH vs $117 - $282 for residential rooftop.
> Rooftop residential is 2x+ times as expensive as utility scale.
This may be true, but a residential install does eventually pay for itself in 5-10 years, and after that, effectively free power. So it's cheaper and better for consumers.
How does that work? Oh yeah, it's because they don't have to pay for the maintenance of the entire distribution network plus the profits of utility companies.
If a residential install pays for itself, it's because it's gaming the details of the rate structure. That is, it lets the consumer avoid paying for much of their electricity at the full retail price, while still deriving benefit from the distribution infrastructure those retail prices are supposed to pay for. This is neither honest nor sustainable.
> That is, it lets the consumer avoid paying for much of their electricity at the full retail price
Much like growing my own vegetables is "gaming" the marking by letting me "avoid paying the full retail price."
This presumes that grid operators are preemptively entitled to dollars out of the pockets of anyone within range of the grid regardless of whether they need it, which is utility propaganda that they use to fight the development of residential power in state legislatures across the country.
Physical objects like vegetables have much more inherent storage (especially when canned or frozen). Also, the consumer is typically responsible for the last mile. This is unlike a grid connection, where you have a wire running to your home sized for the maximum you might consume at any moment, not the average. Because solar is correlated among consumers, the distribution network still has to be sized for what they might occasionally consume, not their average consumption. Also, the power sources on the grid have to be there for these occasional peaks. If vegetables aren't available? You eat something else.
If enough people get solar, rate structures will change to be less based on kWh consumed and more based on what you have the right to call on, even if you don't consume it. This is similar to large industrial rates.
What you are doing by opting out of the grid is raising the price of electricity for poor people. That's an aspect of electrical energy that's rarely talked about. The current model of the grid providing power to everyone only works because everyone is buying power from the grid.
That suggests that all of the distribution, maintenance, and administrative costs are on the order of 2-3 centers per kWh, which is about 1/8th of the cost of a kWh. So I'm going to soft disagree on that point. Besides, we could further decentralize with small modular nuclear reactors (think neighborhood to small town to even small city scale) and cut out a ton of grid cost.
> Besides, we could further decentralize with small modular nuclear reactors (think neighborhood to small town to even small city scale) and cut out a ton of grid cost.
Yes, we could. But you know and I know we're not so let's stop kidding ourselves. Nuclear is off the table in the US for the foreseeable future.
So you are admitting its not a corporate boondoggle?
> but a residential install does eventually pay for itself in 5-10 years, and after that, effectively free power.
LCOE amortizes over the life of the system so that its an apples to apples comparison.
> So it's cheaper and better for consumers.
Its cheaper for the homeowner. Its likely more expensive for the other ratepayers, especially if there is net metering or RPS. They have to spend more on storage or flexible generation to combat the duck curve and have to make up for the fixed costs that net metering is not covering plus buy solar generation at the retail rate instead of wholesale. And its not a good deal for the taxpayer who is paying for a third of the system price since they are getting less carbon reduction per dollar than they would with utility scale.
That last one combined with RPS has really gotten on my nerves lately. My city I've seen several panel installations done on the north side of a gabled roof. That's such a horrible deal for tax payers.
Sure, but that's only free power during the day, when the sun is shining.
If you want "free" power at night (and on cloudy days), you also need battery storage, which can double your initial cost. And the batteries don't last 25+ years like the solar panels do; you may even have to replace them before your break-even point.
If you don't have battery storage, you're still relying on the grid at night, and relying on selling excess power back to the grid during the day in order to zero out your power bill. So you're still making use of the distribution network that someone has to pay to be maintained.
For exactly the same reason we should subsidize the cost of nuclear energy to ensure a sustained ~25-40% nuclear base, we should subsidize solar locally (rooftop et al.) and utility scale.
The answer isn't either or, it's all of the above.
Lazard's LCOE metric is absolute nonsense. Besides ignoring intermittency and the variability of renewable generation it uses an incredibly unrealistic cost of capital comparison that favors capital intensive renewables. Rooftop solar would look better if the cost of building a massive utility scale solar farm had to funded at realistic corporate discount rates.
Rooftop solar is still taking advantage of that transmission and distribution; the consumer with their own solar is just not paying their fair share of the cost of that infrastructure.
> Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles
Citation strongly needed. Especially in a context where turning sun power into carbon-based fuel wouldn't want to be in a parking lot, but could be near or even colocated with a large solar installation.
..but that'd pay for 100,000 - 200,000 residential solar panel installs that would primarily benefit...residential homeowners. That'd be a ton of jobs, too. And there'd be no power-company profits.
We could crunch numbers on how much more efficient a utility-scale plant is, but look at the reality of who ends up with the money and the profits and who has to keep paying the same damn power bills.
Ivanpah is a CSP plant; that technology is a dead end and its cost numbers have nothing to do with PV plants, which are the only kind which get built now.
With the benefit of hindsight, Ivanpah should never have been built, but at the time both CSP and PV looked competitive, and so it made sense to invest in both. Now it does not.
That is a solar thermal system not a photovoltaic system. You are comparing different technologys.
Last I checked, solar thermal is not a price competitive utility scale generation technology; photovoltaic is. That facility was probably funded as a large scale experiment to investigate the viability of solar thermal at increasing scales (or corruption).
The gigawatts of new utility scale PV being brought up every year are largely privately funded and cheaper than existing generation sources (in the current context).
My biggest case against utiliy-scale solar is that it (can) displace important natural ecosystems. Whereas home or commercial solar nearly always is just displacing rooftops, or parking lot covers.
> but that'd pay for 100,000 - 200,000 residential solar panel installs that would primarily benefit...residential homeowners. That'd be a ton of jobs, too. And there'd be no power-company profits.
If those homes are not grid-tied, good luck with electrically-powered heat pumps as a winter heat source during the winter anywhere that has a winter. Not everyone has (and for the foreseeable, can have) a Passivhaus.
So that means the local grid has to be able to accept the overflow in summer and deliver in winter, which means ... power-company involvement and likely profits.
In addition to the other objections raised to this comparison (seriously, attempting to compare a non-PV solar farm with residential PV installs is... silly at best), consider that you're not even comparing them in the right way. Ultimately you want to compare the cost per unit energy per unit time, amortized over the respective life of the panels. You also need to compare the cost of maintenance over the life of the panels. And you don't get to say "the residential ones are covered under warranty, so it's free"; someone has to pay for it in the end. When I was looking, all the residential solar installers I talked to would also remove and replace the panels for free when the building's roof needed to be replaced. Again, that's a cost, even if it isn't borne by the homeowner.
Saying that "it cost $X to build this, and that would pay for Y other things" is meaningless.
> And I happen to think that maybe humanity should learn how to leave some things alone. Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.
A lot of people are responding to your other point about proximity, but I think this is the much more salient one.
Deserts are not dead. They are ecosystems too, and just paving over deserts with solar and wind is going to harm those ecosystems. We spend so much time and effort to elucidate the ecological harm that fossil fuel power generation does but we seem to be content to ignore how much damage solar and wind can do too.
No, this is not an argument against using solar and wind. We absolutely should be. Just...we need to stop ignoring the costs of these methods. There's no free lunch in this world.
Wouldn’t solar benefit desert ecosystems by providing more shade? Most desert animals are nocturnal anyways, I guess you might even see more activity during the day. I don’t think solar means “paving the desert”, most panels aren’t at ground level, and they aren’t even that close to each other.
> Wouldn’t solar benefit desert ecosystems by providing more shade?
Potentially. Just as likely to destroy the ecosystem though. Barring a few human-caused ones, most deserts have been around for a long time, and the plants and animals that live in them are adapted to them as they are. Maybe additional shade will provide a new niche for some organisms, but it will also disrupt the existing ones.
> I don’t think solar means “paving the desert”
If we take any solar installation of notable size as disrupting the existing system, then the difference between literally and figuratively paving the desert becomes moot.
Unfortunately, I don't think we get out of this without damaging the environment to some degree. Hell, just mining the copper that goes into this stuff damages the environment.
So yes deserts are fragile, but what isn't? Something is going to suffer no matter what.
My point isn't that we need to avoid the damage, it's that we shouldn't ignore it. It's really no better ignoring the negative consequences of renewables than ignoring the consequences of fossil fuels. They may be less, but as you point out they still exist and we need to do more to mitigate them.
Installing solar on residential and commercial rooftops and parking lots is a fantastically inefficient use of time when compared to building utility-scale solar farms. The per-install fixed costs are a lot larger than you'd expect. Consider that, to reduce my own home's draw on the grid to more or less nothing, I'd have to spend $35k (before government incentives, so more like $23k) on a 4kW solar install plus battery storage. As a part of a utility-scale build-out, that $23k will go a lot farther.
We already have a ton of experience transporting electricity over large distances. Losses are not zero, but are not significant enough to matter (2-3%, usually).
Damage to desert ecosystems is a very important concern. I'm not sure how to solve that. But if an alternative is we fall further behind on saving our planet, the desert ecosystems will suffer there, as well.
Overall, I think we should be doing and encouraging both. Local generation is great, but we still need centralized generation.
>Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed, like rooftops and parking lots. Utility-scale solar power projects like this are just more corporate welfare boondoggles.
What is more efficient, a utility with dedicated engineers and technicians who spend their days managing an install or clueless homeowners who can’t even be bothered to clear the leaves off their panels?
Installation and management for large scale commercial companies is _much_ cheaper. Bespoke rooftop installs require way more permit, engineer, contractor overhead. Oh year and don’t forget to upgrade your roof framing and hope your installer doesn’t ruin your waterproof membrane of your roof. Have a clay tile roof? There’s another 5k in broken roof tiles.
Transmission losses are in the noise by comparison.
And when your components go out… a small potato install can basically go pound sand. A friend of mine has been out 18 months b/c LG Chem recalled his battery and hasn’t replaced it! They remotely disabled it, so it can’t be used.
Contrast that with a utility. LG chem would probably have a dedicated field agent to manage bad batteries for a utility scale buyer.
>Deserts have fragile, intricate ecosystems. This fucks them up. We need to learn to stop fucking things up to gobble up more energy.
You know what’s worse for desert eco systems than solar installs? Climate change. Gobbling up 25% of the deserts to prevent the other 75% from becoming totally uninhabitable sounds like a bargain to me.
We need more solar as soon as possible. Messing up the desert to save the artic and permafrost is a winning bet every time.
2. the US southwest is where the sun is. insolation per unit of area is crazy high compared to elsewhere, meaning you need less panels per unit of generating capacity.
As a point of reference, it is about 4000 km from LA to New York. Assuming a linear drop-off (probably not true, but close enough), you would only lose 10% crossing the country.
Solar panels might be decreasing in cost 10% annually, so over-building to accommodate that seems entirely feasible.
There are better alternatives than rooftops. Covering canals and reservoirs works well because it also prevents evaporation. Farms and grazing land can also be covered with solar since a lot of plants and animals prefer not to be under direct sunlight all day.
Imagine if every big box store parking lot was covered with a solar panel roof? Customers walk to the store in shade and out of rain, cars aren't extremely hot in summer when customer returns, electricity for EVs right there, excess can go to grid or batteries, not disruptive to anyone or ecosystem, large sizes. Obviously someone has to pay for it which is always the tricky bit.
Here in Santa Fe (and urbanized NM in general), you're seeing this not in big box parking lots (yet), but in public building parking lots (including schools).
It is freakin' awesome. I imagine the 2nd graders at school around here, growing up with the idea that you can make electricity from sunlight just as second nature to them as the internet is to all of us freaks here on HN.
Well, I’d prefer there to be much less parking in cities and for those big box parking lots to get filled in with housing or something more useful. But I guess it’s fine to put solar in them for now.
This quote from Wendell Berry often occurs to me in these contexts:
"One possibility is just to tag along with the fantasists in government and industry who would have us believe that we can pursue our ideals of affluence, comfort, mobility, and leisure indefinitely.
This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on.
This is fantastical because the basic cause of the energy crisis is not scarcity: it is moral ignorance and weakness of character.
We don't know how to use energy or what to use it for.
And we cannot restrain ourselves.
Our time is characterized as much by the abuse and waste of human energy as it is by the abuse and waste of fossil fuel energy."
Someday, when the last red dwarfs are burning out and all the black holes have evaporated, the Malthusians will get their “see we told you so” moment. Thankfully that day isn’t today.
> This curious faith is predicated on the notion that we will soon develop unlimited new sources of energy: domestic oil fields, shale oil, gasified coal, nuclear power, solar energy, and so on.
I think this is like many new technologies - overestimated in the short term, underestimated in the long term.
I'm reminded of voice recognition systems. we would be able to talk to our computers! well, that didn't happen, but we did get telephone voice response systems, then you could talk to your car, and now it is ubiquitous.
The idea is less that we can or cannot develop unlimited sources of energy, and more that we have no idea how to use that amount of energy in ways that aren’t destructive.
Long distance transmission of massive amounts of electricity is a solved problem, it just requires funding and political will to do it. Look at the Pacific DC intertie which takes power from the massive hydroelectric dams associated with the Columbia River down to California.
There is no serious reason why solar power plants in the UT, CA, NV, NM and AZ deserts can't transmit power 1000 to 1500 km to far-away loads.
Did they ever get their ultra high voltage grid going? Last I checked, it was still in the planning stages, and they were still running coal in the east because they couldn’t tap renewable power from the west. Looks like they are still building:
1500km from those deserts doesn't even begin to reach most major population centers. It needs to get much further than that to be impactful on the bulk of the population.
Surely u/bit_logic's enthusiastic phrasing was aspirational vs literal.
That said, the bottle neck is now expanding and upgrading the grid. u/bit_logic is advocating we continue to build new generators, do not wait for the grid, and use that excess capacity to create green hydrogen. ASAP.
aka known as The Correct Answer™.
Here's an interview with Andrew Wang of ETFuels, who is executing this strategy, with paying customers, today.
"Making shipping fuel with off-grid renewables" [2023/06/28]
Air conditioning is a significant chunk of electricity used, and it would make sense to generate power to run it on site if and when possible.
We should have a national program to create zero-interest loans to incite homeowners and businesses to invest in on-site solar when possible. Make the loan payments managed by the power companies so they get a cut of the action and are incentivized to play along.
That way, you still are paying the power company monthly bills but most of that is paying down a debt that will eventually go away.
> Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed, like rooftops and parking lots.
Yes and no.
Yes. In places like Southern California, rooftops and parking lot solar would do a great job of providing power for mid-day consumption.
No. This is far less effective in, say, Seattle or Pittsburgh.
However, HVDC links are really good at moving power over long distances. The US has lots of places that are effectively completely uninhabited and would make really good spots for solar farms if they had an HVDC link.
Utility/grid scale solar isn't just corporate welfare, it's old thinking regarding centralized production.
The electrical industry fears becoming a mere 'backup' or network instead of generation and supply. Or people disconnecting from the grid entirely, destroying economic viability of the infrastructure. They're pushing laws in various states that make a structure uninhabitable if it doesn't have a grid connection.
The only reason most people need to still be connected to the grid are low solar days and peak usage that the panels alone can't supply.
In 10 years you'll probably be able to have an iron flow battery in your basement or backyard that is completely harmless and can meet peak needs, like running an induction stove or a heat pump.
At that point, why do you need a grid connection? You don't.
> At that point, why do you need a grid connection? You don't.
I have a 6.7kW ground mount array. It generates 3x our needs in summer, 0.33 of our winter needs (we heat with air-source heat pumps). We'd need a battery as big as our house to deal with that.
> The only reason most people need to still be connected to the grid are low solar days and peak usage that the panels alone can't supply.
Your use of "only" is doing a lot of work there. It is absolutely essential that something serves electricity during those "only" times, and in many cases a power grid with centralized production is the only thing that can do that.
I live in California, and I could easily meet my year-long needs with a 5kW PV panel install and a couple storage batteries, and live completely off the grid. I don't think I'd do that, as it'd be pretty expensive to set up (with break-even period at ~15 years, after which the batteries would probably need to be replaced), and I'd want the grid as backup. But much of the US just can't do that, especially in the winter when they don't get much sun and their heating needs (even with the most efficient heat pumps, with a backup for the few coldest days during the year when the heat pump just won't cut it) would easily outstrip solar production and battery storage.
The idea that most or even many people could live off the grid economically, with current technology, is just complete fantasy. And I don't think anything is going to change dramatically enough in the next 10 years to change that.
> Solar is so much more useful close to where it's consumed
I'm not really worried about this. Humanity has already invented the greatest utility-scale battery. Pump water uphill when it's sunny. Let it flow back down, through a turbine, when it's dark out. No lithium needed!
People often talk about the space required for pumped hydro, but it's probably a lot less than all the shopping mall parking lots in America.
This article [1] on pumped hydro tempered my expectations a lot - It calculates that a nation-scale pumped hydro battery for the USA would need to be about the size of Lake Superior and have a 300 m height drop
I've read that before. The big thing he's wrong about is requiring 7 days of storage. For coal, oil, and gas you need 7 days of storage to account for supply disruptions. Like when a hurricane lashes the gulf coast.
Solar and wind while intermittent have so much redundancy they never have week long interruptions. You can look at CAISO's charts of solar output in California. You get a couple of days in the winter where production is off due to weather. But not a week.
Pretty sure the UK already ran into this problem when the North Sea had low wind for a prolonged period. This year wildfire smoke would have cut into the valuable days for many solar installations in the northern US/Canada, many hazy periods were close to a week. The intermittency problem is only going to get worse as the amount the grid relies on grows, it's easy to cover the occasional 5% loss grid wide, but a 25% loss is a big problem.
A little deeper comment is one should compare the costs associated with a supply reduction vs the cost of the storage needed to mitigate the disruption vs how often that happens.
The argument that you can't afford 7 days of renewable storage is just restating that the marginal cost of fossil fuel storage is lower than the cost of electric storage. While ignoring the ability to curtail demand.
I wonder how efficiently a similar solar powered lift system would work for a "dirt battery"?
The *dirt battery I have in mind would be a vertical pulley system with small dirt scoops spaced at regular intervals. The scoops would pull dirt from the bottom of the pulley system and bring the material to the top were it is dumped into a mechanically locked, very large container. Over time the container would fill up, and when that stored energy is needed the container could be unlocked, at which point it would power a clockwork of turbines on its way down.
It’s less efficient than normal electric batteries and will take up far more space.
Gravitational storage only works in the very particular case of water, where moving it is downhill nearly perfectly efficient and free, and where you can also get free energy from things like rivers feeding in.
Yeah, now that you mention it I suspect that the mechanical stress upon a system that lifts dirt (as opposed to one that pumps water) would result in expensive routine maintenance, and possibly even catastrophe (i.e. the chain breaks).
ARES Nevada is developing a 50MW GravityLine merchant energy storage facility on approximately 20 acres at Gamebird Pit, a working gravel mine in Pahrump, Nevada. This project will employ a fleet of 210 mass cars, weighing a combined 75,000 tons, operating on a closed set of 10 multi-rail tracks.
Do you have any sources of anyone waiting for grid-scale batteries 45 years ago? Batteries for the grid only started being a thing relatively recently. I am not ready to write them off without giving them more time to figure out scale and economics.
This illustrates that a big part of the problem is political, not economic or technological.
We have the technology and money to get to nearly 100% renewables (we'd likely keep some non-renewable fallbacks in place) in a fairly short time... hell, we could be there already.
But the coal industry is a powerful political lobby -- both the executives and workers who don't want to lose their jobs -- and so coal sticks around.
The US coal lobby is fighting for more domestic infrastructure for shipping coal internationally. That would lower the price of coal, thus increasing demand and consumption.
After fucking over Canada on the Keystone XL pipeline, I hope the Biden administration sticks to their “principles” and shuts that down too. It will be interesting to see.
Sorry, no idea why you would undergo the inefficient and complex chemical reactions needed to produce carbon based fuels when there are easier alternatives that you don't have to burn but can use a fuel-cell for.
E.g. the sodium cycle. Sodium (Na) can under circumstances outlined in the expired US patent US3730776A react with water (H2O) where there is no flame but instead flow of electrical current. You get a sodium hydroxide (NaOH) solution + a lot of energy + oxygen if you do it well, if you do it less well, you also get hydrogen and less energy.
The well known Castner Process can be used to split molten salt NaOH and get sodium, hydrogen and oxygen in the process. That does work under lower temperatures than the electrolysis of NaCl which is more efficient if you only look at this part of the cycle to get sodium. If you use sodium as fuel, the cycle as a whole is important for recycling.
Sodium has much higher density than e.g. liquid hydrogen and does not require any cooling or pressure for storage. Also, it melts at about 100°C so you can pump it if you can keep it at about the temperature of boiling water. Yes, NaOH is caustic but neutralizes quickly in the nature which cannot be said for oil spills. You can keep NaOH in normal steel containers. For instance, it is common to use NaOH when cleaning clogged toilets. However you wouldn't pour gasoline down the drain.
> We should be blanketing every inch of desert with solar. And pair it to use excess energy for carbon fuels synthesis.
Is there any EROEI analysis for this approach? Direct air capture of carbon is rather energy intensive, because CO2 concentration in the air is really rather low, whereas making solar panel is very energy expensive. If we can’t get enough useful energy from the panels during their expected lifetime, we shouldn’t be blanketing deserts with those.
Also, blanketing the deserts with panels is difficult due to environmental regulations, read eg. about desert tortoises at Ivanpah, and the cost of their relocation. If we want to use deserts to generate energy, first we need to solve the problem of environmental regulations blocking it.
The price of a good is almost always higher than the price of the energy invested (usually significantly). Solar panels are used for generating energy. Therefore, if a solar panel is profitable to buy and operate, then it almost certainly generates more energy than it cost to produce.
Solar panels are profitable and are one of the cheapest marginal sources of power in many places. Therefore, solar panels are almost certainly net positive.
Synthetic fuel generation is probably not in the current environment. Storage is not a major problem yet at the current power generation mix. It may become competitive if storage becomes a problem, or if solar drops in price by 66% or more.
Direct air capture is about $300-$600/ton of CO2. The numbers for this are terrible as everyone is posting estimates of what it'll cost by 2030. So let's pick $300/ton of CO2.
If we could convert captured CO2 directly into gasoline, it would have a market price of $170. This is already pretty problematic because I'm ignoring the cost of getting the hydrogen for gasoline, or the fast that 75% of CO2 is useless oxygen.
More realistically, there is $60 worth of gasoline in that ton of CO2. And you still need to pay to get those hydrogen molecules.
For example, if farming didn’t already exist, it would probably be illegal to start it, because of how turning big patches of earth into monoculture completely destroys preexisting ecosystems. There is no known effective way to mitigate this damage, efficient farming at scale requires this, and inefficient methods will require more land and likely cause more damage.
Similarly, blanketing deserts with solar panels will very much significantly damage existing fragile desert ecosystems. You can maybe avoid some of the negative aspects by carefully chosen procedures, but in general, there is no way around it.
The question is whether the specter of environmental destruction will hold us hostage, and allow other, grandfathered environmental destruction to proceed.
Permaculture people would probably argue about the higher productivity of permaculture systems (which theoretically have a better shot at maintaining/mimicking natural ecosystems) versus standard monoculture farming. The problem is that permaculture outputs don't fit neatly into the existing industrialized food supply chain.
In theory we could produce more food and fuel while preserving diverse ecosystems, but it would require refactoring our entire conception of what we eat, how it is produced & preserved, distributed, etc...
“Permaculture” is just a meme among hobby farmers with an environmental knack, it’s simply not possible to feed the people this way (whatever permaculture actually is in practice, as it seems to mean something different every time I hear about it), and even then it still destroys the preexisting ecosystems.
> The problem is that permaculture outputs don't fit neatly into the existing industrialized food supply chain.
No, that’s not a problem, “food supply chain” will buy produce from you with not a lot of concern of how you have grown it, as long as it meats the specs. The problem with “permaculture” kind of stuff is that it simply doesn’t produce adequate amounts of food, relative to required investment of labor. That’s the problem with it, not “industrial supply chain”.
> In theory we could produce more food and fuel while preserving diverse ecosystems, but it would require refactoring our entire conception of what we eat, how it is produced & preserved, distributed, etc...
I hear this kind of vague stuff often, but rarely any concrete proposals. Whenever I do, these almost always involve reducing the human population to a fraction of existing population, and have the remaining ones consume only a fraction of what people consume today, with higher labor investment required from each. This is, obviously, a non-starter, which is why actual, concrete proposals are not forthcoming.
> grow switch grass, harvest it and burn it to harvest the flu gas co2
Idk if you burn it. Digest it, maybe, into a fuel or whatnot. My point is biomass is a more-familiar industrial input than whatever comes out of direct-air capture .
There are a range of non-lithium storage technologies that are much more suited to the task. As you say, lithium batteries are only suitable for diurnal mismatch and dealing with curtailment. But there is a lot of investment going into non-lithium batteries, electro-mechanical, etc to solve the bigger issues of seasonal storage and resilience. A lot of people like vanadium flow batteries for their unique properties but that may create a supply chain issue. I also like iron based solutions. But they will take a long time to validate and lithium LFP is ready now.
I'm slightly confused by this so I think I might just be missing a critical piece of the puzzle: Wouldn't natural gas plants burning synthetic carbon fuels still emit some portion of that carbon into the atmosphere?
Synthesis of carbon fuels from what's already in the air is theoretically net-neutral if you use clean energy to do it; you're just taking what's there, and putting back what you took.
The main issue with fossil fuel is that we are burning embodied carbon from millions of years ago, throwing the present system out of whack.
Ah! I see, you mean carbon capture and utilization as synthetic fuel. Yeah I think that's a good idea to pursue, though I have a lot of skepticism that it will be able to scale faster than other stuff that's going on (like battery storage and enhanced geothermal).
We do have applications where batteries don't seem like they can solve fundamental physics issues.
Batteries are too heavy for cargo ships to float, and too heavy for planes to fly. The only other real credible alternative is hydrogen, which has been trying to get off the ground for about three decades now. And of course we have all the extant hydrocarbon infrastructure that would need to be duplicated.
You'll note that I didn't say we should use batteries for everything :) I think synthetic fuels are a great idea and I look forward to watching how the whole competitive landscape plays out between those and hydrogen-based solutions and (maybe??) really small nuclear.
Not to mention all the combustion engines that already exist around the world. Just look at the prevalence of motor bikes in India and Southeast Asia. Can we really replace all of them with electric tech? Synthetic fuels or ethanol are a drop in replacement.
Small engines are awful for emissions of lots of nasty things other than carbon. Converting small engines to battery electric is a huge win for health outcomes far beyond climate change.
E-bikes and electric scooters have tons of daily range. For cases where you need more range quick swap stations like gogoro make it fast, cheap, and simple. Unlike cars where the battery is huge personal mobility batteries are pretty small and don’t need special tools or lifting capabilities.
Yes, but it'd be net-zero based on the carbon used to produce the fuel. In theory at least, in practice most synthetic methane has only been produced by scavenging CO2 byproducts from the chemical industry. It's not truly net-zero rather it's releasing CO2 that would have been emitted anyway. CO2 is in too small concentrations in the atmosphere to effectively capture.
What I was missing was that the assumption here is that the input carbon is being sucked out of the air. As you point out, that isn't the only way to get it...
Not at the moment. IMO the prospects aren't good, due to the low efficiency (high energy cost) and high equipment cost. There are start-ups working on it (ex: Prometheus Fuels [0], Twelve [1], Synhelion [2], honorable mention to Terraform Industries [3] which is targeting methane).
Everything that can be electrified, will be electrified, because it's more efficient. It seems like shipping & aviation are probably the hold-outs.
I used to think this was the way, especially for balancing the grid, but the more I read [4-7], the more it looks like batteries will be used for fluctuations <1 day, and demand adaptation for longer periods. Some of that adaptive demand may wind up being used for hydrocarbon synthesis, but I don't expect it to compete with fossil fuels for a long time, if ever.
Direct air capture + electrolysis for hydrogen is a Rube Goldberg machine with ridiculously low efficiency.
As for profitable, it's perfectly profitable for meeting its goals of predatory delay. The longer fossil fuel companies can string along useful idiots, the longer they can continue being profitable.
It depends on whether direct air capture of CO₂ can be cost effective. If so, then it can happen. E-fuels will just be renewable energy plus water and air. That is likely to be pretty cheap. If DAC isn't doable, then it probably can't be profitable.
No. And its a huge waste of energy. E-fuels are more likely a fairy tale you tell people so they won't buy electric cars.
Where I live, the fossil gas industry has been running ads promoting green hydrogen, and of course fossil gas as a clean "bridge technology" to H2. So just keep running that gas heating system, cuz it'll switchover to H2, for sure, at some decade in the future.
If this fuel costs $100/gallon, it's cheaper and thus more sustainable to aggressively subsidize EVs before synthesising fuel. If, on the other hand, it costs $6/gallon, funding its production with a tax on fossil fuels makes sense.
Rejecting reality "to save humanity" is a false economy.
No, this is very wrong. You always need to be asking this, because you want to be using the most effective approach towards your goals, and price signals are irreplaceable tool to determine the effectiveness.
Climate change prevention should distance itself from the environmental movement in my opinion. Make it clear that we're focused on stopping global warming for the benefit of humanity. Yes, blanketing deserts in solar panels will destroy habitats. Yes, mining lithium is ecologically destructive. And we should cut environmental regulation for both, because the survival of humanity is more important than desert tortises.
Even if we went 100% renewable today we would still be consuming vastly more resources than the earth can handle. The priority should be reducing needless and wasteful consumption. That means getting people out of cars and onto bikes or public transit. That means eliminating land use regulations that create inefficient sprawl.
Of course that won't be the priority for the government though, because there aren't any special interests that can benefit from that. Politicians don't really care about the environment. Don't trust them to spend money fixing the environment.
> That means getting people out of cars and onto bikes or public transit. That means eliminating land use regulations that create inefficient sprawl
This is a generational project. We don't have time for it. That doesn't mean we can't do both. But we can't only make the long-term massive-upheaval play. While suggested with good intentions, it's the sort of thing a fossil-fuel lobbyist will latch onto as a stalling tactic.
What resoruces are you talking about? Seems like everything can be solved with enough energy and the earth can surely produce enough energy through nuclear.
> The priority should be reducing needless and wasteful consumption.
In an utopian world I would agree with you. I find consumerism ugly as well. However, without consumerism there is no economic growth. Without growth no capitalism. Without capitalism no democracy and peace. It would completely upend our civilization.
I mean consider how crazy everything goes when we have a small dip in economic markets.
china is installing all those panels. china's newly installed solar capacity in just 2023 will be twice the entire total solar capacity of the united states. and they operate more offshore wind turbines than the rest of the world combined and are also installing new wind capacity than anyone else by far
https://nbpa.com/
Lebron James and Stephen Curry are in a union and they don't seem to be having any issues making a lot of money.
Or maybe something more similar to software development, the screenwriters guild:
https://www.wga.org/
Again, there are many rich screenwriters, Google for a list of the top paid and it's obvious being in a union hasn't stopped high compensation.