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Re:Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row by simonhorlick on Thursday November 16, 2023 @09:08PM (#38298417)
Did you know that tidal energy is actually not renewable? Harvesting tidal energy slightly slows the rotation of the planet over time. Here's a quote from the relevant paper by Liu:

> Based on the average pace of world energy consumption over the last 50 years, if we were to extract the rotational energy just to supply 1% of the world's energy consumption, the rotation of the Earth would lock to the Moon in about 1000 years.

Re:Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row by Cyphase on Thursday November 16, 2023 @09:38PM (#38298672)
Re:Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row by pmoleri on Thursday November 16, 2023 @09:35PM (#38298652)
I did not. And find mind boggling that we have the ability to virtually stop earth rotation in such a small timeframe with that little effort. I'll definitely read more about it.
Re:Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row by EmmaEngineer on Thursday November 16, 2023 @09:46PM (#38298746)
Solution: in summer we pump the tides higher with PV, and in winter we draw them down.
Re:Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row by Marsymars on Thursday November 16, 2023 @10:24PM (#38299087)
There’s discussion about that piece here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37383283
Re:Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row by sarchertech on Thursday November 16, 2023 @10:56PM (#38299355)
That paper assumes that the worlds energy will keep increasing at the average rate from the last 50 years for 1000 years.

That’s a terrible assumption. First because the rate has been slowing (even before Covid), and second because the end result of that extrapolation is more energy than we could every hope to produce without building Dyson spheres around stars.

If you do similar calculations we’d cause severe problems harvesting that much energy from wind or geothermal as well.

Re:Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row by nottorp on Friday November 17, 2023 @06:43AM (#38302203)
Hmm have you asked intel and nvidia about that?