This seemed off to me, so I checked the source. From TFA (in Technology Review):

>Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.

>At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries.

Can anyone tell me how can this possibly compute? 94% of new electricity generation is renewable,[1] and it's not like power plants have a lifetime of 400 years...

edit: Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time. They're using numbers from 2003! Essentially they're looking at the tail beginning of the logistic adoption curve[2] (the sloooooooow exponential ramp) and extrapolating it in a linear fashion. But logistic curves are "S-shaped," not linear.

[1] https://electrek.co/2018/01/12/94-percent-new-electricity-ca...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Applications

It would only take 0.6 percent of total US land mass covered in solar to power the entire country (about 100 miles by 100 miles). The batteries to back that energy production would only be about 1 square mile. That doesn't take into account residential rooftop solar already producing. Nor wind turbine parks in the middle of nowhere that contribute to farmer and rancher incomes. Offshore wind can be sited anywhere along the costs outside of shipping lanes, far enough off in the distance to not be seen but close enough to keep transmission costs reasonable. We are awash in clean, renewable energy.

To your point about the developing world, India is aggressively deploying solar, and is 4 years ahead of its solar capacity targets.

Solar and wind are ramping on curves somewhere between linear and exponential. They can be turned up in months, not years. They can be sited almost anywhere. They are what is going to win the day.

[1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/has-us-nuclear-powe...

https://blog.ucsusa.org/mike-jacobs/solar-vs-nuclear

"In comparison with nuclear, the amount of solar power built in 2016, taking into account how many hours each can operate each day, is the equivalent of more than 3 new nuclear plants.

To dive in a little deeper: let’s use a 25 percent capacity factor for new solar, making the 14,626 MW installed equivalent to 3,650 MW of theoretically perfectly running nuclear plants. The Westinghouse AP 1000 units under construction for the last 7-10+ years produce about 1,100 MW. So, in one year, solar additions were equal to what takes more than 7 years to build. The difference in speed of deployment is why UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) is clear that nuclear power isn’t a near-term climate solution."

So if you're not going to take my (rando HN poster's) word for it, the Union of Concerned Scientists seems somewhat reputable.

Also because of the way the Navy works their reactors are less bespoke for each ship than traditional land based reactors - and better fit the mass production model. This is something that could scale.

1. http://mragheb.com/NPRE%20402%20ME%20405%20Nuclear%20Power%2...

Wind farms go great on agricultural farms - they tend to have wide open spaces, and the actual footprint of a tower can have minor impact upon the productivity of the field.

Solar generation goes great on both residential and in particular - commercial buildings, over the tops of parking lots, etc - which has the dual effect of producing power and reducing the heating of the underlying building/parked cars (great for reducing the need for air conditioning)

Your average suburban home has enough roof area to produce either all of, or a significant fraction of, it's own energy for a moderate household.

Marginal-use land (hilly areas), coastal areas, and off-shore are also generally good areas for windfarms too.

Elon Musk begs to differ. Here's something he said: “If you wanted to power the entire United States with solar panels, it would take a fairly small corner of Nevada or Texas or Utah; you only need about 100 miles by 100 miles of solar panels to power the entire United States,” Musk said at at the event in Rhode Island. “The batteries you need to store the energy, so you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square-mile.” https://www.inverse.com/article/34239-how-many-solar-panels-...

something like an area the size of the US to power the world, per Steven Pinker

Not to slag on Pinker, but Musk has proved himself to be a hell of a lot better visionary in the real world than most anyone else, and that includes pop authors.

Somewhere else I saw a claim of 0.6% of US land area needed for US power needs. Even if it's 1%, no BFD. Let's assume that many areas of the world don't have as good solar irradiance as the USA. So maybe it's 2% in some other places. Still, no BFD.

IMO the biggest problem with current nuclear is that it's run by utility companies. Those places aren't staffed by the world's brightest bulbs (heh heh). Allowing morons like that to build and manage nuclear plants is akin to allowing toddlers to play with live hand grenades. Most of the time they don't pull the pin, but when they do the results aren't pretty.

PV solar is simplicity itself. No moving parts. Linear economies of scale: 2x the panels means 2x the cost and 2x the power.

OTOH Southern Co. is now saying that the two nuclear reactors they are trying to complete will cost more than $25 billion. https://www.myajc.com/business/southern-says-vogtle-costs-ex... Oops.

Furthermore, while they are renewable to they are also unreliable and need to have backup sources which makes them unfit as a enegy base. Remove the subsidies and you will see just how problematic they are.

And then we haven't even looked at the problem with producing them, maintaining them etc.

http://instituteforenergyresearch.org/topics/encyclopedia/so...

I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children.

The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.

Fancy real time viz: https://www.electricitymap.org/

[1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/1689559...

First graph at the top left (which is actually energy consumption, close enough): https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat...

The important thing in this grap is the absolute values of each source, not their relative importance. You'll note that despite renewable growth (of which solar and wind is only a fraction, there's also biomass and various other stuff), fossil-fuel consumption is still growing faster. Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones. Each time, the new sources just provide additional power on top of the old ones.

So much for 'decoupling'.

Edit : the US energy article on Wikipedia has an interesting graph that shows something similar (except for a partial switch from coal to NG): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...

If only HN had a remind-me bot, I'd like to set a notice: oil demand will plateau within 5 years.

http://longbets.org/

We don't use whale oil anymore.

You are constraining your history in a single century, and "older energy sources" in a single set of mostly equivalent ones.

When we talk about our energy needs, scale matters a lot. So yes, when it comes to climate change and energy use, you can ignore the rest of human history completely.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/fossil_fuel?wasredirected=tr...

Also, whale oil was not really used as an energy source anyway, except in lamps.

So it's completely irrelevant to my original point, which is that by and large, until now, in the thermo-industrial civilization, new energy sources have not been used to replace exisiting ones. They have been used to 'grow' the economy (more machines, more people, more production).

Maybe this graph can convince you: https://ourworldindata.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/global...

This is one way to make welfare payments more effective. People are spending their money on food, and not as much on heating.

If you live in a country with denationalised utility companies you can get them to pay for this from the profits they're getting after denationalisation.

But, even when you do this you find people have different reasons for not accepting the offer.

The UK "Nudge Unit" found that the thing that drove more signups to loft insulation wasn't just free insulation, but offering a free loft clearance service too.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/may/02/nudge-unit-...

> For years, by offering financial help to insulate people's lofts, thereby reducing their energy consumption and their bills, successive governments had been trying to give money away – and failing. But in 2011, the nudge unit realised that money wasn't the problem. What held people back was all the clutter that they knew was stored up there.

> So in a trial, people were offered not subsidised insulation, but subsidised loft clearance – with unwanted items being taken to local charity shops – on the condition that they got the space insulated afterwards. The scheme cost people more, but they loved it, and uptake rates tripled. If the insulation was subsidised as well, it became a fivefold increase. Another approach was less successful, but equally revealing. When offered a still greater discount for every friend or neighbour they roped in, people took no interest. You cannot put a price, it appears, on being seen to be a loft-botherer.