Aside from urgency, it's also likely that wind, solar and hydro, even if deployed maximally, might not be able to meet the total peak demand every where. Renewable are obviously superior but for that gaps, we will need fission anyway.

Fission plants have a finite lifespan anyway so if fusion or space laser or whatever appear, openings will be appearing constantly.

It might just be right that if renewables can't meet current demand, prices go that bit higher to keep usage in line. It's not a given that we must consume as much as we do (or more) forever given the finite nature of the planet and everything.

That really hurts the crowd that lives paycheck to paycheck. Price goes up: someone goes without.

Not as much as it'll hurt the crowd living in locations that are likely to be totally wiped off the map in the event that we fail to mitigate the issue which is still likely.

But independent of this, I'm pro wealth-redistribution at any rate so really I see the solution to the paycheck to paycheck problem in terms of that. Massive investment in switching to green energy should also help by creating good jobs, as well.

The largest bulk of excess emissions doesn't appear to come from individual habits so much as structural industrial practices - things like producing things far overseas and shipping them by oil tanker, electricity production still being heavily reliant on coal, commutes being effectively mandated for many workers as their work doesn't pay them enough to live close to their job - or their job being doable remotely but corporate policy preventing workers from taking advantage of that (to both the benefit of their free time and health as well as the environment). So it seems unfair that working people should be punished for something they have limited power over.

What is electricity prices went up with usage? So you get X kWh per month for one price, then after that it's 1.5x the rate. You could just do this on residential rates only so businesses aren't affected.

Uber surge pricing on a basic living utility? No thanks. Same issue as with fuel - the wealthy people who are often the most wasteful with resources (driving Hummers and V8/10 SUVs and cars, private jets, etc.) are the ones who would be affected the least because the price wouldn't impact their habits. Meanwhile, a middle/low-class family would be paying 1.5x the rate to keep the lights on home.

Price based on monthly total use is the opposite of surge pricing.

If those wealthy people are happy to pay a 5x or 10x rate, you can use it to install tons of renewables (with batteries). That's not something to complain about.

> Meanwhile, a middle/low-class family would be paying 1.5x the rate to keep the lights on home.

If it's not low, middle, or upper class, who do you imagine is paying the 1x rate?

why remove the incentive for businesses to optimize their energy usage? They have as much if not more external costs as a residential home.

If anything it is most important to apply this to businesses. Most consumer choice related emissions, as it's often framed, is taken through the proxy of a business that hasn't optimised their energy output to this extent. This is all the more relevant when you consider that consumers often don't have visibility over the practices of the business that they're interacting with, and particularly that of the supply chain further down the line. Like are all these lit up signs really necessary for any businesses to function, do you think? Or are they just trying to stay visible in a sea of neon?

Exactly. How about offices that keep the lights on or half-dimmed all night, as well as the computers running? Businesses are often the most wasteful.

That's a good way to encourage the middle class to conserve. Subsidies are needed for the poor.

But why not redistribute money, and let people choose what to spend it on, rather than having a separate system to distribute each individual resource?

Perhaps not meeting peak energy demands and instituting "selective blackouts" for a few hours each day is the break we need from technology's intrusive reach

Nuclear power is way slower than current generation renewables.

The energy storage problem isn’t solved for current generation renewables as far as I know.

Laying out a ton of solar panels everywhere is great but if we have rolling blackouts when it’s too cloudy for a while people will be very upset.

Given that Costa Rica, Uruguay, Iceland, Norway, Paraguay, and Tajikistan already run on 100% renewables (and Tokelau runs on 100% solar + batteries): I would judge this to be extremely solved.

I believe this is incorrect, at least according to this source I found: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.FEC.RNEW.ZS?year_hig...

You may be mistaking energy production with energy consumption. However, I'm not entirely sure what qualifies as "energy" in the list that I found. If we mean only electricity, then I believe some of these countries are still less than 100% run on renewables.

Your data is from 2015.

There are plenty of sources illustrating that things have changed in that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay#Green_energy_supply

Providing evidence that is speculative for one country is a far cry from the evidence needed to support a definitive statement about several countries, particularly when I provided a source that strongly suggests something to the contrary. I doubt every country on that list completely halted the use of non-renewables in the last 3-4 years given that use was in the double digits in many cases.

At home, some of my excess power is syphoned off to neighbours, but I'm also using an amazing energy storage technology called batteries. Our government has just announced a number of new large-scale battery farms, as already deployed in neighbouring states.

I hear people say this sort of thing all the time, "All we need is bigger batteries", but I think the thing folks don't realize is really how small even the worlds biggest batteries are when faced with the actual amount of electricity we use.

One of the worlds biggest batteries (currently under construction nearby LA) stores the huge-sounding amount of 400MWh of energy. What isn't clear to folks who don't do the math is that battery is really only big enough to help out with peak load periods. The peak consumption of LA has reached as high as 6,393 MW (about double their average peak). At that rate, that battery -- literally one of the biggest ones in the whole world -- will last just 3.8 minutes.

This is like extrapolating from the first pilot nuclear reactors to the potential of what they could become: it's just hugely fallacious.

Only small pilots have been deployed because batteries are just getting cost competitive now for the first time, and utilities are super slow to pick up new technology. They're not used to living in a world where there is new technology, but they are slowly waking up.

It's going to be like digital versus film cameras. Once the critical cost threshold is crosses, they will scale like crazy. And batteries are trivial to scale to huge or small sizes. We could start putting them in all substations and massively increase reliability of the grid in addition to switching to 100% renewables. It's just a matter of cost, we know how to engineer and build them. With nuclear, it's a matter of cost, and we know how to engineer, but we don't know how to build or scale.

what I took from what you just said is that batteries would already work fine for periods of peak load, i.e. they work when they are needed.

I’ve read gravity hydro storage is one of most effective per unit cost but that has significant constraints and potential environmental impacts. But in a region with a lot of waterways hydro is an awesome tool to provide renewable on-demand energy and store excess

I've heard saltwater batteries make sense for this, they just need a lot of space.

You ignore the time it takes to get a nuclear power plant online. Let alone all the permissions for it.

Know what would work today? Reducing our energy consumption.

Reducing our energy consumption and building alternatives to fossil fuels are not mutually exclusive. Let’s do both.

Also western nations have been doing this for the last 30 years. The house you live in today has appliances that are 3x or more efficient then it did 30 years ago. It's better insulated, it's more recyclable etc.

It also doesn't make a damn bit of difference of base load power comes from coal.

couldnt be morong.

nuclear is very slow to deploy and limited in capacity. the industry suffers from significant latency and tight bottlenecks.

the 2018 world nuclear outlook, a dubiously bullish and optimistic predictor of industry trends, shows that the most ambitious likelihoods for capacity growth will struggle to match total global demand growth - and that's assuming most plants up for (or past) retirement get license extensions. Nuclear is just too slow to make a meaningful dent in carbon-fueled power, and that's even before we consider cost.

renewables are our future, but also my present. My home produces more power than i need; half the houses in my street have their own solar panels; the shopping centre and church down the road are plastered in them. And although the local power company is 99% gas, they're buiding a medium-scale solar farm down the hiway; nearby small towns are fully solar already; and the next-largest city is building a battery farm to enable them to be more than 50% renewable within 10 years.

Small modular reactors in the US are already in the licensing/regulatory phase.[0] They are portable and have reasonable prospects of providing baseload where renewables/batteries can't. Many have very safe failure modes also, not requiring power/pumping. It's going to a niche future for nuclear though.

Cost-wise renewables are already winning in many parts of Earth and viable efficient storage has become the main problem.

Batteries are great for quick on-demand grid balancing, but are environmentally damaging and lose large amounts of capacity within half a decade.

Supercapacitors hold great promise, but like fusion always seem 20 years away. On a $/Ah scale they are useless today, but don't suffer from any of the flaws of batteries apart from weight/volume issues.

Gravity storage [1] seems the most promising, pumped hydro isn't that efficient and very site-dependant, rail or crane weight systems seem to outperform and hopefully they gain some traction

[0] https://www.nuscalepower.com/technology/technology-overview

[1] https://www.aresnorthamerica.com/grid-scale-energy-storage

[1] https://energyvault.ch/

At this point it's fairly obvious that the continued use of fossil fuels will lead us to danger than fission. Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable. We'' just have to figure out how to deal with the fission devil until we get fusion. Hopefully, fusion isn't too far off.

> Perhaps we're trading one devil for another, but the devil we know is not sustainable

Trading the devil you know for the one you don't is wisely considered a bad idea

That certainly depends on how devilish are the one you know and a random one.

Any advice on that level of generality is useless and better trashed.

The whole point is, you don't know how devilish the random one is. As bad as global warming will be, we know the risks and we can prepare for them. Whether we'll actually do that is another matter..

Getting concrete now, specifically about nuclear power, we know exactly how bad it can be. We have a very large amount of certainty about how the worst case looks like, we know very well how to prepare for some of it, and we know very well what to do to avoid the rest of it. We know those to a much higher certainty than we know the consequences of global warming. It's not a blind choice.

The only thing we don't know well is how much improvement current technology brings. We have an idea, but there are probably flaws on our estimative.

I don't think nuclear will help, mostly because it's too late. But basing decisions on ignorance is crazy.

Basing decisions on known ignorance is not crazy. In fact, I'd call it appropriate humility. It's just that the smart decision is more likely to be a "not yet / need more information" than a flat no.

Basing decisions on limited understandings is also not crazy. I've heard the rough US Army guideline is to act when you have 70% of the information. If you wait too long, there's often no right answer.

Anyway, my whole point is probably one level meta from what you're talking about. I find many disagreements turn out to be simply two different simultaneous discussions.

See, this is why we shouldn't have banned trans fats. Sure they were killing people, and sure we knew it, but the devil you know...

The substitute for trans fats was returning to butter and other natural fats, which we originally left because we thought they were so bad for us that products like margarine must certainly be better!

Thanks for making my point.

Sorry, butter is still widely (unfairly) considered evil. We replaced trans fats with rapeseed oil, soybean oil, and palm oil, which are hardly the foods our grandparents ate.

Note: I didn't say we don't know the fusion devil. We do. Just perhaps not as well as the fossil fuel devil.