Re:World Appears on Track to Triple Renewable Power by 2030
by ben_w on Friday December 01, 2023 @04:31PM
(#38492733)
> Solar by itself can’t replace power generation needs no matter how cheap panels get without batteries. They can only offset some demand (same for wind).
Not so.
While my following suggestion is a fantasy from the POV of geopolitics, from the purely technical perspective it's dead simple to wrap the planet in a 1Ω wire that hooks up all the major deserts so that at least one of them is in daylight at any given moment.
It's a square meter cross section of aluminium costing a few hundred billion dollars at current prices, not that current prices are the real cost anyway as that would take several years of current global output.
But on paper it's fine.
> And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can.
Right now, sure. But that fast ramp-up is very fast, and once we have enough for cars, it's fairly straightforward to just reuse the worn down car batteries for another few thousand cycles in static power storage before they get fully recycled.
Not so.
While my following suggestion is a fantasy from the POV of geopolitics, from the purely technical perspective it's dead simple to wrap the planet in a 1Ω wire that hooks up all the major deserts so that at least one of them is in daylight at any given moment.
It's a square meter cross section of aluminium costing a few hundred billion dollars at current prices, not that current prices are the real cost anyway as that would take several years of current global output.
But on paper it's fine.
> And we just don’t have the capacity to do grid scale batteries - we barely have enough for electric cars and we’re ramping that up as fast as we can.
Right now, sure. But that fast ramp-up is very fast, and once we have enough for cars, it's fairly straightforward to just reuse the worn down car batteries for another few thousand cycles in static power storage before they get fully recycled.