What about flow batteries and hydroelectric gravity storage? Whenever there’s a generating surplus the former can use less toxic, lower energy density electrolytes to store energy because one uses standard high-volume liquid storage tanks to hold them, and the latter just means to incorporating pumping water back uphill into existing hydroelectric reservoirs. Sure, the efficiencies are lousy, but they make up for it in scalability.
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We’ll never run out. Because we will have renedered the planet uninhabitable to us long before then.
Got any more dinosaurs? 
I think SAFE nuclear is the way to go in the near term. I’m sure soon Elon will come up with a way to toss nuclear waste into the sun… but then tell us it’s not necessary because radiation isn’t dangerous.
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Don’t need to throw it into the sun. In fact it’s more dangerous to try launching it into space because rockets do explode. Nuclear waste isn’t stored in leaky glowing barrels like in movies.
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the simpsons has lied to me :).
I’d be worried about nuclear car accidents. even atiny one would be bad :).
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Anyone have a 1900C heat source laying around the garage?
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Problem solved, then!
Oil doesn’t come from dinosaurs particularly (if at all), very successful oil company propaganda notwithstanding. This commercial at least admits that some plants were involved.
Celebrating over 40 years of “alternate fuels”!
There was one I can’t find of similar vintage where the commercial is showing them looking for dinosaurs and the dinosaurs hiding.
But it’s…well, it’s synecdoche at best.
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Actually, petroleum doesn’t come from dinosaurs at all, it is compressed plant and algae material from the Carboniferous period.
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Good to know that petroleum is vegan.
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Efficiency is only a problem when you’re operating near the limits of your production capacity. If we started cranking out solar and wind installs in large quantities and focused more on point of use generation instead of centralized generation I think that’d take us a long, long way.
Someone else said that we’re not really dealing with technical challenges, which I think is mostly true.
Think about how crazy it is that neighborhood-scale solar and wind installs aren’t really a thing. If we focused on generating power locally and treated each neighborhood as their own separate but interconnected grids we could take advantage of economies of scale that individual home/business owners can’t.
Sort of like how localized steam distribution networks help make cheap heat available to buildings that can’t afford to install and maintain independent systems.
I know that the grid already basically works this way, but the size of the cells are too big and going full-on decentralized is totally impractical.
The other big problem we should be tackling is energy waste.
There’s moderately inexpensive stuff we could do at the city scale to cut way down on energy usage. Mandate (and pay for) things like double-layer roofing with air gaps for ventilation, paint roofs white in warm areas, inspect older buildings and require and/or pay for insulation upgrades, audit industrial and commercial properties’ energy usage and incentivize reductions and penalize increases, etc.
Energy waste is a massive part of the problem. There’s no reason to continue allowing the sale of incandescent bulbs, tanked water heaters, etc., and if we were ever serious about climate change we’d heavily subsidize homeowners and businesses to get them switched over to the highest efficiency stuff we have available.
I’m struggling to articulate it well because I’m trying to relate it to stuff like homes and businesses that most people are familiar with, but the worst offenders on the waste front are factories. Like, it’s not even close. If we stopped making disposable sh*t and went back to making things that last and/or are repairable, we’d be in much better shape.
Edit:
To try and out the scale of the problem into perspective, I used to work at a tire factory that made tires for mining equipment and buses.
We made 5000 tires every day, 7 days a week, 50 weeks a year (give or take some isolated holidays,etc).
One (1) of our sister plants that made tires for passenger vehicles like cars made 40,000 tires per day at its peak.
They closed it down recently. That plant employed 1300 people and those 1300 people were making 6.2 MILLION tires per year. There are around 60 tire factories of similar size in the US alone that crank out around 330 MILLION tires per year.
There are 250 million cars in the US. Roughly. That’s about 1.2 billion tires when you count spares. US factories alone make enough tires to replace every single car tire in the country every 3-5 years.
Where do the old tires go?
…
…
…
…oh.
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While important, the issue with a lot of these suggestions to reduce energy waste is dumped on homeowners and are expensive. My house is 40 years old. We’ve added more insulation over time, and installed more energy efficient windows, but there is no way we can afford to install solar panels (and never mind that the roof isn’t inclined in the right direction anyway.) When we had to replace the water heater, a tankless version cost three times as much as one with a tank.
If we can’t afford this stuff, as middle-class homeowners, there is no way anyone making less than we do, or living in an even older home, will be able to do so.
Some things can be improved with new construction projects. High rises that use rooftops for greenspace to reduce heat. Better construction materials and methods, but again, that also raises the price, and is not something you will see in “affordable” builds.
That’s one of the elephants in the room. And no, I don’t have a good solution for it. (And apparently neither does anyone else.)
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Solar panels are crazy expensive. Like “do you want solar panels or do you want to replace your 12-year-old car” expensive if you’re on a middle class income.
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And then, “Well, you’ll make your money back in 12 years.”
“How long do these panels last?”
“About eight years.”
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Oh and I live in Colorado, the hail capital of the country. Solar panels and hail … probably not a good combination.
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Ooh, that’s a good one. Here the cleaning is a major issue.
Also, another gimmick is you “rent” the panels and then if you ever want to sell the house, the next buyer also has to rent the panels. “Buy a house! Pre-liened!”
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My sister was selling her house and the initial offer she accepted fell through because of this. Which seems insane to me because:
– the leased panels were right there in the house description which the buyer could see before making an offer
– it’s ARIZONA just pay for the damn panels! Free air conditioning!
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As long as you use the correct kitty litter they are safe.