Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity | Hacker News Reader

Costa Rica has gone 76 days using 100% renewable electricity

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579 pointstchalla352 comments

Notice this is because 80% of the energy obtained was from Hydroelectric power, which is a great energy source because it is reliable - unlike wind and solar which in this case provided 7% and 0.01% respectively and are not reliable. It frustrates me that so many environmentalists are still against hydro because it alters ecosystems when nature itself is inherently violent, dangerous and in a constant state of flux. I sometimes think they reject the idea that the whole point of existence is human flourishing and happiness. The biggest real problem with Hydro in the context of human flourishing is ensuring that the dams are well-constructed and nature proof i.e. hold up against natural disasters because if they don't downstream settlements and human lives can be at risk.

I sometimes think they reject the idea that the whole point of existence is human flourishing and happiness.

Yes, many people reject this idea. As a matter of fact, this is the first time I've ever heard anyone express this idea.

You have spent way too much time on Hacker News. Gross Domestic Happiness was coined in 1972 and the idea exists way beyond that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness

For example, the US Constitution proudly proclaims that "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" are unalienable rights. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life,_Liberty_and_the_pursuit_...

Nit: The inalienable rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" is in the Declaration of Independence. None of those things are broadly recognized as rights in the Constitution. I have been unable to determine to what extent referencing the Declaration of Independence is permissible in questions related to constitutional law. I'm inclined to believe that it depends on the party involved. (Scalia certainly objects to Declaration of Independence having legal sway [1]. Surprisingly to me, Clarence Thomas goes the other way [2].)

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/99-138.ZD1.html [2] http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/373697/clarence-th... - I wasn't able to find a clear opinion from Thomas citing the DoI, but I am not good at searching through opinions.

I stand corrected, but in any case, the very founding of the country was, in stark contrast to basically every country on Earth that had ever existed to that point, declaring that the "pursuit of happiness" is of utmost importance.

That says something about what America was striving to be, and comments like the one that sparked this thread show how absurdly far from that goal America has slid.

Gross Domestic Happiness is enhanced by caring about things beyond human flourishing for many people. Many people care about the environment. GDH was in fact invented precisely to capture dimensions beyond that of human material improvement (more dams, more houses, etc.)

A clean environment is a luxury good most people didn't even know they wanted until economies advanced enough to make them an option. To see a present-day version of this difference, one need only look at China. That's how Americans viewed the environment before WWII.

If you watch the evolution of, say, the Sierra Club, its focus has shifted to reflect the changes in values over time It's very interesting. One of the really fun! things about Micheal Crichton's "State of Fear" is his curmudgeonly way of bringing out the denial of the nearly axiomatic assumption these days of environmental purity being a path to happiness.

You're confusing "didn't even know they wanted" with "took for granted". In the pre-industrial era with much lower populations, human-sourced massive environmental pollution wasn't common. Many people didn't even realize it was possible. Everyone wanted and most people had clean environments and only learned to make it an issue when the clean environments started to disappear in places.

You have spent way too much time on Hacker News.

That's probably the most truthful statement I've ever read on here.

It's actually a really old idea. Sadly, not one that gets a lot of press, as it's not very sexy to talk about dead Greeks (except to reject them).

https://orwell1627.wordpress.com/2013/06/30/aristotles-purpo...

Eudaimonia is more like "ethics for virtuous and stable society" rather than saying very much about human relationship with the ecosystem. in the ancient world the human relationship with the ecosystem was extremely different than it is now.

Right, but the core principle underlying all that is that human happiness is a good in and of itself, and a virtuous and stable society is good only in that it allows for the greatest potential growth of human happiness.

If your grandkids are less happy because you destroyed the environment in order to increase your happiness is that a negative or a positive in this philosophical framework?

it was unthinkable in the original Aristotelean framework. They had no notion of being capable of destroying the environment in the way that we can now.

A negative. Just ask G.K. Chesterton!

My grandparents did everything within their power to "destroy" the environment, and I'm perfectly fine.

Well I'd much rather have Advancement over Happiness. We can be happy our entire lives but if everyones dies before 100 and humanity never goes anywhere I wouldn't consider that a successful society. Happiness is masturbating 24/7 until you die. If you truly believe that is the goal of humanity I can't help but disagree.

How do you define "advancement" without happiness? What are you advancing toward?

are you serious? that reads like satire.

The question is how to obtain happiness, though. Does it necessarily have to entail ruining the environment?

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” ― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Maybe it'd get more clicks on HN if we link the Alpha Centauri technology achievement:

http://alphacentauri2.info/wiki/Eudaimonia

Alex Epstien, who is widely despised, has written, in The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels that to withhold cheap abundant energy, and the technology it enables, from the world's emerging populations is immoral and fundamentally anti-human. Supported by people who think this Earth would be a much better place if Man never set his filthy foot upon it.

Epstein is an idiot and coal shill.

If you'd like a more nuanced version of that argument, I'd suggest Vaclav Smil, who's written at length on the topic of humans' interactions with the environment. I'm wrapping up his Energy and World History right now, which makes a similar case that fossil fuels have tremendously improved quality of life ... for a small fraction of humans currently alive. The impacts for others range from markedly less to net negative. The larger problem is that the situation isn't long-term tenable -- it will last so long as those fossil-fuel sources are cheap and abundant, and the sinks for their and associated effluvia are capable of absorbing insult without returning injury. Neither condition can be reasonably argued. (Yes, Epstein argues for both, he's not reasonable, and incapable of credible reasoned thought.)

The ultimate problem with Epstein's argument is that, in the face of limits to growth, the lives made possible through increased fossil fuels will only add to the deaths and suffering removal of that energy subsidy will result in.

Yes, overpopulation and overconsumption are problems. Systemic dynamics make addressing this exceptionally challenging.

I have second-order Facebook contacts who are overt environmentalists. Some of them are self-consistent enough to actually admit that they think human population level is the root of all these problems. That is in itself probably true, but I can't quite be hypocritical enough to attack a phenomenon that supports my very existence.

To that:

"There are too many people." "You first."

But they don't have good operating knowledge of population dynamics and current birth rates. It's rather that they bought prior exponential analyses of exponential human population growth and never fully discarded it. They also appear to know that fossil fuels are a part of this phenomenon.

So there are Druids who walk amongst us.

Misanthropy is easy to come by when evidence supporting it is widespread. The best thing to send to anyone worried about population is: https://www.gapminder.org/videos/dont-panic-end-poverty/

Misanthropy is dangerous.

theres also religious folks who believe the earth was created specifically for humans, and so everything here is for us and us alone.

I find it a rather disgustingly self centered ideology. To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism

> To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism

Humans are the most important things in the world. Why? Because I am a human. My family are humans. To me, and likely most people, humans are most important.

If I were an Otter and capable of self reflection I would likely think Otters were the most important things in the world.

Now this absolutely does not mean I don't value Otters. In fact I do. Otters are awesome! Just because I feel humans are the most important thing doesn't preclude me from having compassion to help other creatures. It's simply an order in which you find things important.

You've essentially manufactured a belief here (parent believes humans are most important therefore all others are in the way), projected it onto the parent and then became outraged by it.

> You've essentially manufactured a belief here (parent believes humans are most important therefore all others are in the way), projected it onto the parent and then became outraged by it.

This is the definition of a "straw man".

I said nothing about what the parent believes, i said that there are religious groups that have an ideology i find narcissistic at best.

besides that gp didnt say 'i prefer humans above other animals' dont change what they said to suit your needs; they said:

>the whole point of existence is human flourishing and happiness.

Thats a significantly stronger statement than you allude to

> I said nothing about what the parent believes, i said that there are religious groups that have an ideology i find narcissistic at best.

So you brought up a point that is unrelated to parent's about what people who belong to a religion believe in? I...should that even be in this thread? I don't get it unless you're actually replying to the parent above you.

> Thats a significantly stronger statement than you allude to

It's not though. They didn't say to bulldoze all the things. Why wouldn't humans flourishing and having happiness be a goal to hit? I can't think of a single thing that we do, when we interact with nature, that doesn't affect the environment in at least some fashion. It's all about balances. If you can add a dam, reducing carbon emissions from other power sources, but it displaces animals within X square miles that needs to be understood. It may be very worth it. It may not it.

What I got from your comment was that the parent poster was bad and that you think most people are bad because they find themselves most important.

Replace "humans" with "white people" in your post, and you'll get a sense of how silly your beliefs seem to me. Not to say my beliefs are more right than yours -- to each his/her own.

Would you kill two black men to save a white man. I wouldn't.

Would you kill two otters to save a human? Yes. Absolutely.

Would you kill two bacteria to save a human? Yes. Absolutely. I would kill a million bacteria to save a human. In fact, we do it all the time.

It's about the lack of consciousness in bacteria, as I would never kill even one mentally deficient adult, even to save the life of a genius.

Which moral worldview do you find superior? I presume you have one, because you're making a moral judgement.

All moral worldviews have defects. life isn't a ... geometry problem.

But if it were, the Rhombic Dodecahedron would be the best shape...

# theres also atheist folks who believe they answer to nobody and can do whatever feels good.

# I find it a rather disgustingly self centered ideology.

Sweeping generalizations can go both ways and are rarely helpful.

There aren't just two ways to go in this possibility space, I'm quite happy ruling out both of these ideologies.

Atheism is the lack of a religious ideology. It’s strange to assign an ideology to a group of people simply because they reject all religious ideologies.

Consider: earth may well be the only habitable planet in our galaxy. In that case its nearer the truth to consider it a gift just for us.

Our brains seek patterns in coincidences. It's evolutionary! We can't stop seeking causal explanations in things that we experience. Nothing is a gift. Life is not fair. Universe doesn't care about us. :)

...but we can care about 'our' planet. That works.

I find the awareness that the Earth is the only place on which humans, let alone modern civilisation, is likely to be able to exist and thrive, to well within the likely timeframe in which we might well eliminate some or all of that capability (say, the next 10, 100, or 1,000 years) makes for far more nuanced consideration.

What humans do to this world in the immediate now will have profound implications to what humans will be able to do anywhere, in any possible future.

Earth being the only habitable planet is incredibly improbable.

We hardly have enough data to say that. In fact we've found nothing remotely similar to Earth in all the thousands of samples we've taken. So if there are any others at all, they number in the dozens?

This whole thread is quite a bit tangential to the fact that Earth is the only habitat planet we can actually get to, and will remain so baring a significant change in technology. Rockets won't get us elsewhere.

So we might as well look after this planet.

A closer truth might be that life can only happen on a habitable planet so it's not really a coincidence or 'gift', just the way it must be if life is to exist.

Consider that the galaxy is 100,000 light years across so even if there are a couple of other habitable planets out there, we aren't likely to get there for millennia.

Without invoking abuses of either relativity or the rocket equation, current physical understanding more-or-less limits us to long-term 'generation ships'. There is some potential argument about cryogenic freezing/revival, but it may be more accurate to talk about human-descended life forms walking on exoplanets rather than homo sapiens sapiens per se.

Humans may not be the only beings on this planet with agency/ consciousness, whatever you want to call it.

How do you know the planet isnt a gift to them, instead of us?

This argument is flawed. If there's a gift, there must have been a giver, so why don't we ask the giver? Well the Christians already have, and they like the answer they got. Why don't you like it?

Except humans are the most important thing in the world. It's not narcissism if it's true.

What's the point of even having a world if there are no humans in it? (Any conscious being, not just humans.)

Animals don't care if they exist, they just do what they were born to do, they don't ponder existence. Neither do plants or rocks.

Humans are the only ones (on this world at least) who actually care, and notice.

Humans being the most important thing in the world by virtue of simply being human strikes me as a tautology and logically problematic. It makes no sense.

I think "species-ism" is both honorable and necessary. I think the opposite is misanthropy and that it's hard to be moderately misanthropic, so one extreme or the other will win out.

In my life, I've fluctuated between moderately misanthropic and moderately speciesist. I don't see the evidence for your slippery slope argument.

"To presume that one (or ones species) is the most important thing in the world (or universe) is basically the definition of narcissism."

Not "one" nor the species, but exclusively for the "believers". Non-believers, heretics & infidels be damned.

Especially "_human_ flourishing and happiness".

Why only human? Why not the well-being of all conscious creatures?

Well, for the most part, that's the accepted interpretation. We just don't value non-human well-being as much as human well-being (which I think given the current species involved is acceptable). The problem is the difference in how we value non-human well-being between different subsets of the population causes strife between those subsets. I believe very few think it's alright to torture an animal for no reason, but to kill an animal (preferably with little pain) for food is acceptable to the vast majority of people. The many levels in-between those are where most people start having problems with the actions of others.

And when it comes to non-fuzzy animals, the gloves come off. We have massive industries to exterminate insects, fungi, bacteria and so on. Even fish are hardly protected. If we could perform genocide on some of them, we would.

Sure. Generally because they have their actions have a negative effect on our happiness, and we value their happiness so lowly that our loss in happiness overwhelms any concerns we have about theirs. We allow the raising of animals for slaughter because it affects our happiness so positively that we ignore that we are actually killing them at the end, and placate ourselves with platitudes about them having a relatively easy life up to that point (which historically was true).

I feel this keenly, being a meat-eater myself. Affordable (and hopefully palatable) lab-grown meet can't come soon enough.

Good job, too - the insects, bacteria and fungi own the planet and we just live here.

It's still them or us, now and again, really.

When someone comes up with an objective measure of consciousness lets consider that.

In the meantime I see no issue with optimising for human happiness in the general case.

you seem to be fixated on the notion of consciousness as being "consciousness sufficiently similar to a human that I would interact with it as if it was a human". maybe some domesticated animals and particularly precocious apes and cetaceans meet those criteria.

In many religious and philosophical traditions though the principle of Panpsychism is the guideline. It means, approximately, that consciousness is an inherent building block of reality and some form of consciousness is an emergent phenomena of just about any sufficiently complex system. This posits the existence of many forms of consciousness that are utterly alien to human consciousness and that we could not readily interact with.

Not great, but the best we have at the moment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test

I don't understand how my cat reacts to a mirror. He notices me in a mirror, but how come he doesn't react to seeing himself, either "hey that's me" or "what's that other cat doing here!?!"

You don't need an objective measure. An approximate one is already better than just "optimising for human happiness".

And I guess you do what I proposed already anyways: The suffering of a dog or a horse is probably also - to some extent - your concern. The suffering of a piece of rock probably less so. Should we learn that rocks can feel pain, too (granted this is unlikely), we should update our morality. It's also part of most countries' laws to prevent unnecessary suffering of animals. And this is all based on the assumed degree to which they are able to suffer. You will get fined for torturing a dog; you won't for torturing a mosquito.

Careful - fancy thoughts: I could imagine that we will update our morality regarding plants one day (given that we see more and more evidence that they communicate with each other, send stress signals etc.).

Sometimes you have to act before all possible information and understanding is in.

The odds are overwhelming at this point that many, many non-human animals have consciousness very much like our own.

That's a very nice sentiment, but aside from the obvious (dolphins, a few whales, some primates, and elephants) do you have any sort of proof or justification for this statement? "Many many" is a very strong claim.

Do you have an objective measure of human consciousness?

Having a discussion about what constitutes consciousness likely meets whatever criteria you can come up with handily.

Optimising for human happiness includes not decimating ecosystems that we depend on to survive.

Sorry, this thread exploded while I was afk.

I adopted this definition from Sam Harris (it was probably his TED talk on science and morals). What I mean by consciousness (and some people in this thread do not seem to have understood this) is not necessarily human-level consciousness, but the ability to suffer. And of course, there are different degrees to which animals are "capable" of suffering.

I did not expect this concept of morality to be controversial at all. I am surprised by the discussion.

> Why only human? Why not the well-being of all conscious creatures?

The human race as a whole is still comfortable with snuffing out conscious human lives (death sentence, wars, 'collateral damage', etc). I think the other creatures should join the line...

because in many cases, the well-being of other conscious creatures is attained by reducing the well-being of some humans.

it's also quite interesting that the humans who should make sacrifices for the well-being of other creatures are usally not the ones asking for it.

*> Why not the well-being of all conscious creatures?

Why only conscious? Why not the well-being of all creatures?

I guess viruses and parasites are a bit pesky to deal with, but still...

By using the term 'conscious' I implied the ability to suffer. There is obviously a spectrum of the degrees to which a creature can suffer - and viruses are on the lower end, probably fairly close to rocks and water.

We only guess that were conscious. Since we don't know what consciousness is... well, we know it when we see it.

human supremacism!

Today you learned about the transcendentals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcendentals

It was (arguably) the dominant way of looking at the world prior to the 1960s. It's possibly Biblical in its origins so it may have been around even before the Bible.

Epicurus talked about this couple millenia ago.

The problem with hydro is that they don't last forever, and when they get old you have to spend a fortune maintaining them, because you can't just "switch them off", especially if in the meantime they've built cities where the river used to be... http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/one-of-africas-bigges...

They can be switched off, depending on how they were built. During the building process you have to create a diversion tunnel, as the water has to keep flowing while you are building them. They should also have ways of draining the reservoir. Also in my state (Idaho, which is largely powered by dams) we have removed a some of the older ones. I don't have any source materials for you, but I had to go thru a ton of dam tours as a kid to learn how the dams worked. We have also had a dam burst (Idaho Falls with the Teton Dam). But every dam is unique, you certainly cannot account for all of them.

Also, dealing with the flood plain, which the dams protect against, that is another story.

Hydro is as reliable as the rain. When I was a child (and 97% of the power came from hydro) the newspapers would sometimes predict power shortage in the summer because there hadn't been much snow in the winter, and sometimes they predicted low power prices because of an abundance of snow.

In a way hydro is rather like solar power, which is as reliable as the sun, and wind, which is as reliable as the wind. I know of places where the sun shines reliably and there isn't much dust, and I know of places where it doesn't. I know of places where the wind blows fairly steadily from roughly the same direction most days, and I know of places where it doesn't.

No -- hydro is like solar, _if we had unfathomably large, incredibly cheap, low-leakage batteries_.

The US southwest is generating hydro power using water it saved up from 30 years ago, behind the hoover and glen canyon dams. That is MANY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE past what we can do with solar.

Come back to me when battery technology has gotten even close to that.

> Come back to me when battery technology has gotten even close to that.

Define "battery". Pumped-storage hydro is literally hydro as a "battery".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricit...

Also completely ignoring the fact that every joule provided by solar is one less joule that hydro needs to provide, which in turn extends their stored energy life.

...

Pumped-storage hydro is pumping water behind a dam.

You can TRY to hollow out the top of a mountain and put the water there (yeah, that's also suuuuuuper environmentally friendly), but it's incredibly difficult to do it at reasonable scale, and when it fails it wipes out towns.

You'll find the only reasonable way to store enough water to make a difference it is to put it in a valley, where the terrain helps you.

And in the end, you've just rube-goldberged your way to hydro power; to actually get scale, it has very comparable environmental impact to hydropower because it ends up being almost the same thing.

You don't necessarily need water: http://www.aresnorthamerica.com/

If you run the numbers on that - cost, amount of energy stored, how much stuff you need, you'll quickly realize you do in fact need water.

I'd love to see them.

Or I can come back to you when technology allows timeshifting usage to match availability.

Even if you want to run a factory 24×7, you don't have to run the most power-hungry parts at an invariant pace, see?

Let your factory sit partly idle sometimes and you increase the capital cost per unit of production.

If wind/solar depends on this sort of thing, then basically it's imposing an externality on factories, and we should account for that as part of their cost.

I'm all for preventing global warming, I just want to do it in the way that's most cost-effective for society as a whole, and that probably means including nuclear as part of the solution so we don't have to shut down factories when the wind doesn't blow at night.

? Except you're talking about _seasonal_ differences in sunlight availability.

I'm really glad I'll be able to run my power-hungry electronics like a refrigerator during peak production times, like during the spring!

We'll just have to make sure that people go to the hospital during probably-non-uninterruptible power windows.

Sorry, but you're dealing with human beings and actual society, not a car factory. Leave me out of your plans.

Industrial consumes 1/3 of US electricity. This is about the same amount as residential use. This isn't about your fridge.

In Chile, the mining companies in the North use a disproportionate amount of energy. They are located in one of the driest deserts in the world and could easily supply their power needs from solar with minimal impact. Instead they continually fight to build dams in pristine temperate rain forest in the South.

I would caution that deserts are some of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world. Covering up large areas of a desert with solar panels may be more harmful than you realize.

That said, I am a strong solar advocate; I simply believe we should start with the roofs of warehouses. These are huge areas of relatively flat space where the ecological damage has already been done.

I agree that we should use caution in setting up solar panels. That said the ecosystem in most of northern Chile is dirt. Not sagebrush or cactus with a few insects, or dormant seeds waiting for the next rain. Just dirt, sometimes rocks. If ever there was a place for solar panels it's northern Chile.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atacama_Desert#/media/File:Ata...

I don't mean to disagree, just share a fun fact: the Atacama is actually so dry, parts of it are barely an ecosystem at all. Obviously, the life that does exist there is quite sensitive, but there's large swathes of desert that are some of the only places on Earth where no life has been detected whatsoever; the land is literally just rock, without even bacteria living in it.

Covering up large areas of a desert with solar panels may be more harmful than you realize.

I've heard & use the term solar strip-mining.

Solar power maxes out at no better than 1kW/m^2 (sun at zenith, clear day, practically 100% efficient conversion), we're talking an absolute minimum of 1 sq km to match a baseline 1GW power plant ... and likely 100 times larger for real-world scenarios (10% efficiency, night/clouds, non-zenith air densities, dust, etc). So yeah, the net effect is "strip-mining" a vast area by removing all (or a seriously impactful percentage) natural power input and thus killing everything off.

Rooftop solar should indeed be the focus. There's even solar panels intended as road/pavement surfaces, super-durable interlinked hexes grabbing power where we've already wrecked the natural surface.

Why do you assume 10% efficiency? That seems awfully low?

I agree with regards to rooftop being an important part, though. It makes sense to use land that is already occupied to a large degree.

If you start looking at effective achieved energy delivery from solar, 10% is exceptional. Consider that plants are lucky to return 1-10%. Algae, under exceptional conditions, may also reach 10%, but that takes some doing.

Insolation: 1 kW/m^2

Panel efficiency: 10-20%, nominally 17%. Maximum for a single-layer cell is 37% for quantum physics reasons, with an "infinite" layer panel, 87%.

Capacity factor is the amount of time a panel actually recieves sunlightlight. Typically 20-30%, with 30% as a peak.

Spacing factor. PV doesn't work if shaded -- the entire circuit cuts out. So you have to angle and space your panels. On net, this reduces availble area by about 50%. Less near the equator, more at high latitudes.

Degredation. For numerous reasons, solar panels degrade with time, mostly due to physical wearing (broken cells, wiring, hazing of panels, stone and hail damage, etc.) When nominal output falls to about 85% new, panels are deemed due for replacement. This is about 20 years based on multiple studies. So you're replacing 5% of your stock every year, and losing a few percent of output.

Inverter losses. Converting panel (DC) to transmission (AC) power costs about 10%.

Transmission losses. Another 6% or so for high-voltage transmission.

Multiply all that out, and your 1 kW/m^2 * 0.17 * 0.50 * 0.9 * 0.9 * 0.25 leaves you with 17 watts of 24/7/365 capacity per square meter. Or about 1.7% net efficiency.

This doesn't account for storage which can cut into that some more.

The efficiency of modern commercial photovoltaic solar cells is about 10-20%.

> 1 sq km to match a baseline 1GW power plant

Does that sound like a lot to you? A single airport runway is much larger than 1 sq km.

Uh, no. Chicago Midway happens to fit very nicely inside 1 mi² = 2.56 km². Its main runways (5 of them) with feeder ramps collectively take up at best ½ the space, so a single runway itself is not 1 km² but more like .2-.3 km².

Midway is an airport for ants. 10/28 at SFO is 2 sq km, and there are two of them, and 1/19 are 1.5 sq km, and there are two of them. Then you also have OAK and SJC.

Point: a square kilometer to generate 1GW peak of electricity would be an obviously excellent trade off, well within the cost parameters that humans are willing to spend on far less useful endeavors like runways and parking lots.

Wikipedia says that 10/28 is 3.618 km. For the runway itself to be 2 km², it would have to be 0.552 km wide. A quick glance at an aerial map indicates that a width of 0.552 km gives approximately the width of both runways, relevant taxiways, and the surrounding ground. Wikipedia says that the runways are in fact .061 km wide, for a total per-runway size of .221 km².

I picked Midway because it's a very conveniently sized airport, being almost exactly 1 mi² in a square-shaped with obvious meter marks (due to surrounding grid system).

Except that 1GW/km^2 is the absolute upper limit. As dreadmorbius computed, reality gives ~1.5% of that.

As I noted: real-world conditions demand 100x as much space.

> roofs of warehouses

And parking lots.

Parking lots are dangerous to build over, for two reasons:

1) people cannot drive. The amount of dents or other damage from incompetent drivers done to a concrete-built park house is crazy, I don't want to imagine the damage they'll do to tiny aluminium/steel constructions holding the panels

2) people cannot drive. They underestimate their vehicle height all the time - just google for "can opener bridge". Just a couple days ago a truck driver massively damaged the lighting in a Munich tunnel because he forgot that the excavator on the flatbed was higher than the truck...

There is no reason to make them tiny: http://solairegeneration.com/project/rutgers-university/

You just build the solar panel mounts like you would usually build lighting mounts (big concrete bases).

Height is less of a concern in some parking lots (where it's virtually all cars)

> They underestimate their vehicle height all the time

There's a simple way to fix that: Have a solid steel bar slightly lower than the max clearance at the entrance. People that can't drive will notice there without causing further damage.

Not to mention multi-level parking lots, which have height restrictions imposed by the structure itself. I'm sure most people wouldn't mind having the top level covered as well.

I agree. They should start by deploying local solar in the huge and already impacted active mining areas.

Solar panels are large compared to a house, not large compared to a desert.

Here is a couple of square miles of solar panels in the Mojave Desert. If you zoom out, you'll find quite a bit more nearby. Whether or not you count this as large, the impact is not negligible.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/34%C2%B048'44.1%22N+118%C2...

EDIT: To be clear, I am not fundamentally opposed to such installations just as I am not fundamentally opposed to new hydroelectric projects, but we need to be aware of the impacts, and we need to make conscious decisions about when the costs are worth paying and when they are not.

Traditional power stations aren't exactly small, either. In fact, people will think you're a lunatic if you start talking about nuclear or coal in "per square meter of land" terms.

Think I point out is there is a perception issue. When people thing 'power plant' they think of a large concrete building with a bunch of machines in it. But they don't think of all of the supporting infrastructure. (Comment I've heard about nuclear power in France is on hot days it's partly limited by the need to avoid dumping too much waste heat into the rivers. Coal fired plants seem neat and tidy until one thinks of the strip mines. Gas fired, the massive network of pipes needed to extract the gas and move it to where it'll be burned.

For context: my local nuclear power station is about 600 W/m^2, unless you count the purpose-built lake it relies on for cooling water, in which case it's 50 W/m^2. The 17 W/m^2 estimate above for solar doesn't look as bad as I would've guessed.

"could easily supply their power needs from solar with minimal impact."

I would really like to see some data backing up that claim. I mean this. It would be amazing, if there were a cheap, reliable way to sustain all energy via solar - since the world leaders in solar energy production can only manage around 7% from solar.

So why are they fighting so hard to build hydro dams when they could so easily and cheaply run off solar instead?

I bet it is because they want to operate mines also when it is dark. I'm interested if millettjon has any other explanations.

If that were true then solar panels really aren't that cheap. Having to run your mines inefficiently should be counted as a cost when comparing the two. Doesn't mean that solar panels isn't still the best thing, of course, just that his assertion that they're super cheap for the power companies is false.

They are starting to ramp up solar only in the last year or two. Endesa, the main hydro company, recently gave up fighting to construct 5 dams in the south due to persistent opposition over the last several years. Hopefully this will accelerate the solar deployments even more. The main mining company CODELCO is state owned. Endesa and CODELCO basically try to do whatever they feel like unless there is enough grass roots opposition. There is also a huge potential for wind generation in Chile which they are only starting to use.

I think the power cost breakeven point has only recently been passed for solar vs hydro there. Nonetheless, they do need a 24 hour supply for a lot of operations, especially pumps and lighting.

Dams are an ecological disaster, just as much as burning fossil fuels. Dams have directly caused or are causing the extinction of several species around the world, that is not counting all the permanent environmental impacts a dam creates.

Hydro is a green energy source if you define green as simply not burning fuel.

Every energy source needs to be looked at with a cost-benefit analysis. The materials for wind and solar are not impact-free, and neither is their use. Before we condemn dams, we should compare them to alternative energy sources that would have been used instead (at the time of building), and assess whether the damage is less or more. Dams may be causing the extinction of a few species (which I assume implies they may yet be saved), but we can't assume that an increase in coal or nuclear power would be impact free in overall climate health or the health of individual species (nuclear has a fairly good track record by plant, but statistically having more plants built in the past may have yielded a disaster, and it only takes once to drastically change the averages for nuclear to significantly worse).

The question is, can new dams be built in ways that reduce or eliminate the problems we've encountered so far?

But the big difference is that the effects are almost completely local and not anywhere as threatening on a global scale compared to burning stuff and causing everything to heat up. This is actually a decisive point because whoever builds the dam will also lookout for the effects it causes and be more reasonable.

On top of that I think that the extinction of species is really not comparable to global warming, which will probably cause mass extinctions on a scale that has not been seen before in human history.

Actually, if mhurron is referring to what I think they are, then it can be fairly global. Think fish migration and spawning, such as with Salmon. Global Salmon population is very susceptible to being disrupted by blocking rivers. That said, I believe there are modern ways to address this problem.

Every dam worth a damn has fish ladders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fish_ladder

Poorly built dams can damage the environment. Except you know, its 2016 and we've figured out how to preserve the environment while providing clean energy now.

The wikipedia article links to this: http://e360.yale.edu/feature/blocked_migration_fish_ladders_...

Not exactly a glowing recommendation.

It seems a lot like those 'nature bridges' over highways that animals never use. A nice idea if it worked, but they don't.

Salmon, as an example, turn out to be a major component of nutrient transfer mechanisms returning fertilisers from sea environments to littoral watershed regions.

http://www.inforain.org/reports/salmon_decline.html

The obvious impact is local, but rivers have sweeping ecological importance, and we dam every one of them.

This is akin to saying that stepping on a nail is just as bad as walking into an industrial meat grinder, since they will both hurt your foot.

I don't think anyone is arguing that dams are zero impact. They can and do negatively impact local ecologies, and have the potential to impact animal populations at a broader scale. These problems can theoretically be offset to some degree with good planning and management, but thus far management has been uneven and middlingly successful.

I'm not being flippant and dismissing extinctions and the disruption of food chains as "breaking a few eggs": they are tragedies, but they are extremely small-scale tragedies compared to the ongoing disasters all other forms of reliable energy generation are inflicting on us. Hydro isn't above criticism, but blanket declarations that it's just as bad as fossil fuels is incredibly dangerous misinformation.

If your point of view is that any energy generation that in any way negatively impacts the environment are anathemas and that we should all be living in caves, then okay, but I don't know how you're powering your computer. Otherwise, you're being hyperbolic and enabling regressive and catastrophic ideas and practices.

A large part of the reasoning behind building many of the dams in the U.S. was flood control. In fact, I think the Hoover Dam was built for flood control reasons, and the hydroelectric part was the means to pay for it.

Enabling consistent river flows, which enables human settlement and farming in otherwise desert areas is definitely an environmental impact, but it's not clear that it is a bad impact.

And not burning fuel is certainly a positive in the eyes of global warming. All that fuel burning could result in rather permanent environmental changes of its own as sea levels rise, etc. If global warming is caused by CO2, then if we got all our power from dams instead of burning fuel, that seems like a place we'd like to get to right about now.

They can't rely 100% precisely because hydro is unreliable. A dry season and it runs down (which it did).

And dams - isn't Mosul going to be destroyed soon because its dam requires constant maintenance (a clay curtain pumped into the porous bedrock) which hasn't happened since Desert Storm?

"They can't rely 100% precisely because hydro is unreliable." True in an absolute sense but in comparison to solar and wind hydro is extremely reliable, and can be used to power the grid when all other energy sources fail [1,2]

As far as Mosul I'm unsure, maybe someone else more informed can chime in on the actual state of affairs there since wikipedia/google turned up multiple contradicting results for me.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroelectricity#Advantages

[2] http://www.hydro.org/why-hydro/reliable/

Mosul is hardly an example of a well engineered dam though built in 1984 and falling to pieces. The Hoover Dam was built in 1933 and is not in need of pulling down.

If maintenance were interrupted (social upheaval) then Hoover too would fail. It take maintenance to keep it running - in particular mussels would foul and stop the turbines in a few seasons.

> If maintenance were interrupted (social upheaval) then Hoover too would fail.

Probably not in your lifetime let alone in a generation. Mosul's an issue because the substrate is not suitable for dam building (it's soluble gypsum, so it just keeps eroding because dam foundations kind-of tend to be around water) so the dam has to be continuously grouted to prevent it from failing.

Add Mosul holds 2.5 million people on a floodplain. When the dam fails catastrophically, it will be a bloodbath. It'll happen in the next few years.

They're not really comparable are they? It's not whether the turbines in the dam will continue to generate electricity, but whether or not the dam itself is structurally sound. My limited understanding is that the Mosul dam is not, while Hoover will outlast us.

The risk in the case of Mosul is failure of the dam face itself. Not merely the generating equipment.

Hoover faces no threats of similar magnitude.

It depends on where the dams are. I live in the North Eastern USA. Most of this part of the country (and eastern Canada) are powered by hydro. Niagara Falls doesn't turn off. Neither do dams, really. Even in the winter (-30F) and during summer droughts, they have water passing over the turbines. None of the dams in my area have needed maintenance in the time I've been alive (about 30 years).

It's cleaner and more reliable than any other kind of energy production on the planet including coal and oil. Nothing is 100% reliable, but hydro is the closest we're likely to get.

Everything requires maintenance. Solar panels have to be cleaned or replaced if they get scratched. You have to clean the bird carcasses out of the windmills. Nuclear requires constant supervision. There's no maintenance-free option.

Coal also requires humans to transport lots of fuel to it, and lots of big machinery to get that fuel.

It depends. Where I'm from we run on 97% hydro power and we never run out.

The biggest real problem with hydro is proper assessment of impact of local climate change and damage on ecosystems. You can find some readings about the effects of big hydropower projects in Siberia or Middle Asia. In the latter construction of hydropower plant may even become a casus belli due to deficite of water and impact on agriculture of the countries down the river.

I think that has more to do with the diversion of water for irrigation. For example, the almost-total vanishing of the Aral Sea.

That's also an issue, but I'm talking about projects like Rogun Dam in Tajikistan, which received strong objections from Uzbekistan.

There's also the Shuren Dam project which may damage ecosystem of Baikal.

> nature itself is inherently violent, dangerous and in a constant state of flux

beware the anthropic fallacy. nature itself just is. violent is a human value judgment. danger is subjective and situational. "constant flux" is itself a contradiction in terms. some ecosystems are long-term stable, others change rapidly even in the short term, and others get suddenly disrupted by unpredictable events.

Unreliability of wind power generate can be largely mitigated by interconnecting disparate wind farms spread over a large area.

Energy investor here with a pretty large wind portfolio (1GW) under management. This geographically dispersed portfolio idea doesn't really work. Due to different wind patterns, and wind types, a wind portfolio cannot be relied on for stable power generation... this is ignoring power curves, availability, transmission losses, network balancing, node bottlenecks, etc.

Take as an example the entire wind capacity in Ireland, and the curtailment issues this generates.

Are you looking into storage as well? The engineer in me says caching is the way to convert an intermittent source to a steady load. I'm really curious what a wind investor is thinking about this!

Have we looked at it, yes. Are we investing in battery storage, no. It's too early for us to invest in this technology. This should be interesting for energy investors with a slightly higher risk appetite.

Ah, that makes sense. It's a very early market. I'm excited for the possibilities, though. If storage can solve the intermittency issue, solar/wind can become baseline load sources more easily, and we'll need far less actual generation in place to maintain the grid. I firmly believe the way out of our power dilemma is just make wind/solar cheaper per kwh than fossil fuels.

Which requires large areas which isn't always possible.

I don't think this will be properly solved until we have proper fuel-cells

I don't think you even need to invoke such a controversial argument as "all non-human lives don't matter". Drastic climate change is likely to impact every species. Considering the vast amount of cheap, safe, carbon-free power that's available from hydro, it's probably the right call for salmon to take one for the team here.

I live in the heart of the PNW and most of my power comes from COAL. The rest; natural gas. It's insane. We could power three states by damming a few rivers. I'm not an expert, but I also think it's more than possible to do that in a way that still let's salmon spawn, depending on how well things like fish ladders and run-of-the-river actually works. I'm pretty sure BC get's the majority of their power from hydro, and from how much time local fishermen spend up there, the salmon are doing just fine.

At least regarding the Columbia and its tributaries, British Columbia is much further upstream away from the ocean, so the salmon impacts of building dams there are less. At least that's my understanding. Also, I expect their dams were built later and thus with fish ladders. (Grand Coulee has no fish ladders whatsoever, being built mostly in the 1930's.)

It's not just about the salmon, although I believe they're worth considering in and of themselves. It's also about the cultures and practices, the foods, etc., that have diminished since the dams interfered with the salmon run. Fish ladders are vastly better than nothing, but even then the rates of passage are significantly less than on an undammed river.

As far as generating mix, it really depends where you live. East of the Cascades there's plenty of wind, plus the Columbia and Snake rivers for hydroelectric. Not to mention a bit of nuclear. Pretty cool map here: http://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=WA#tabs-1

In British Columbia (BC) we get 86% of our power from hydro.

There are lots of dams in the Pacific Northwest... just drive along the Columbia river, for example.

Here is a little bit of background why hydro can be seen as less carbon neutral than say wind or solar: http://www.ecowatch.com/the-hydropower-methane-bomb-no-one-w...

It might be, but is still more practical. Both solar and wind also rely on mining, something environmentalists also oppose.

> hold up against natural disasters

That may not be enough, though[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vajont_Dam

My understanding is that even if we were dam up all the rivers in the world, the power generated wouldn't come close to covering the current global demand

Dams have an issue with methane emissions (a potent greenhouse gas)[1]. If I remember right, the type of dam also matters, and there are numerous problems with megadams in particular.

[1]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/methane-emissions-...

All Adam Curtis films are thought-provoking ( he's as easy to disagree with as he is to agree with ) but the one that covers this is "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace".

This film "accuses" modern environmentalism of being an artifact of systems-think that arises from the computer industry. It thinks that the whole idea of a perfect environmental equilibrium comes from that.

It also marries "computer perfectionism" to Neoliberalism in interesting ways. I don't recall if he brings up Adam Smith's "Man of System" as a "villain" here but that seems obvious enough.

I think it rather ignores people like John Muir but it's an interesting idea and worth chewing over.

Obviously, I suffer deeply from this same bias myself :)

I have solar at home and it's extremely reliable. For the last 11 years, it has generated electricity 100% of the time the sun was shining. Oh, maybe you meant something other than reliable?

Something that works only during certain times of day and weather is not reliable from the perspective of generating electricity.

The fact that your solar installation is in good working condition means it works reliably but that doesn't make it a reliable source of electricity.

Whether or not something is a reliable source of electricity or works reliably are two separate things and OP is talking about the latter. Can I flip a light switch at any time and reasonably expect solar to provide me electricity? No. Then it's not reliable source of electricity.

From a grid scale perspective, reliability means it can be scheduled for a certain amount of energy. In some areas solar is very reliable.

Gas, coal, and nuke generation goes down for maintenance all the time. But if it can be scheduled so energy demand is met all is good.

Maybe not reliable, but very predictable.

You can rely on solar to generate electricity when the sun is shining, but you cannot rely on the sun to always be shining, hence not reliable.

But if solar panels were located at both the north and south poles and connected to the grid, would that work?

"100% of the time the sun was shining"

What about the other times?

Yeah like Night. Where I live in winter the days are about 8 hours long, when I'm at work, so no electricity when I'm home at all.

Where I live, the number of sunshine hours in December varies between 6 and 49 (years 1981-2010), average is 26 hours. That means a bit under one hour per day on average, but sometimes there's a week when the sun doesn't show up at all.

Not really a great place to use solar when you need most electricity, although on the average we get more sunlight hours than Central Europe. We just get them when there is less need for electricity.

Probably reactive or controllable. Wind, solar, gas, nuclear etc. cannot be controlled to the degree that opening the gates can. So it can respond better to the energy demands based on time of day.

Gas and nuclear can both be adjusted to match grid demand.

Pulling out control rods or cranking up the gas turbine are presumably pretty quick. Helping this is the fact that humans aren't all that difficult to predict in terms of energy usage.

> it has generated electricity 100% of the time the sun was shining

They've done studies, you know. 60% of the time, it works every time.

As I've said many times on hackernews, hydro power isn't carbon free. Land and trees are flooded to support dams. That means a reduction in carbon uptake, less room for bambi and lots of other issues. It's akin to clearcutting a forest, but at least after a clearcut the forest grows back.

It all depends on what type of area you flood. Empty desert is one thing, coastal rain forest another. Better than coal, but not perfect.

The power output of a hydro dam, relative to the lost land and its plants, is many orders of magnitude improvement. It's a massive win in terms of carbon footprint.

And the lake is not dead - its just a different ecology.

> .. energy obtained was from Hydroelectric power, which is a great energy source because it is reliable.

Is that assumption always true in the age of climate change? New Zealand gets about 50 to 60% of its energy from hydro and there have been concerns about the viability of it during periods of drought.

Hydro not just alters ecosystems. It also kills a lot of people in construction and maintenance accidents.

As you point out, it's vital they're well-constructed, but so far we've not done very well in that respect. E.g. nuclear is far safer per unit of energy output.

The really nice thing about hydro is that it's nimble enough to make up for the intermittent nature of wind and solar.

Costa Rica's hydro capacity is enough to enable a huge expansion of solar and wind not only in-house but in the neighboring countries.

I think environmentalists would be more accepting of dams if we didn't dam just about every damn river.

> I sometimes think they reject the idea that the whole point of existence is human flourishing and happiness.

Whether or not someone agrees with your idea of the purpose of life is not the only cause they have for decision making. Even the very idea of "human flourishing and happiness" means something different to everyone. Personally I cannot imagine myself flourishing or being happy in world were we have destroyed the beauty around us. Here is an excerpt from the book "A Last Chance to See" by Douglas, which does a much better job than explaining the ideas of conservation.

> "In every remote corner of the world there are people like Carl Jones and Don Merton who have devoted their lives to saving threatened species. Very often, their determination is all that stands between an endangered species and extinction. But why do they bother? Does it really matter if the Yangtze river dolphin, or the kakapo, or the northern white rhino, or any other species live on only in scientists' notebooks? Well, yes, it does. Every animal and plant is an integral part of its environment: even Komodo dragons have a major role to play in maintaining the ecological stability of their delicate island homes. If they disappear, so could many other species. And conservation is very much in tune with our survival. Animals and plants provide us with life-saving drugs and food, they pollinate crops and provide important ingredients or many industrial processes. Ironically, it is often not the big and beautiful creatures, but the ugly and less dramatic ones, that we need most. Even so, the loss of a few species may seem irrelevant compared to major environmental problems such as global warming or the destruction of the ozone layer. But while nature has considerable resilience, there is a limit to how far that resilience can be stretched. No one knows how close to the limit we are getting. The darker it gets, the faster we're driving. There is one last reason for caring, and I believe that no other is necessary. It is certainly the reason why so many people have devoted their lives to protecting the likes of rhinos, parakeets, kakapos, and dolphins. And it is simply this: the world would be a poorer, darker, lonelier place without them.”

Studying nature shows us just how resilient plants and animals have been to the intense changes in environment and finding and endless stream of ways to survive. However, it has become increasingly even more so since this passage was written that the human race may be the one hurdle life on earth may not be able to overcome. Human flourishing and happiness itself is reliant on the very planet we currently occupy and it's no longer enough to try and temper our environmental impact. We need to minimize it. I'm not well informed enough to have an opinion on hydro verse solar, but I can say its incredibly valuable and important there are people who hold different ideas on the importance of conservation.

> whole point of existence is human flourishing and happiness.

Because humans are gods. Right. Unbelievable.

nature is inherently violent yes, but the effect of humans on the rest of the species on the planet is equivalent to extinction events that are rare on geologic time scales (already!) and some people want to keep making that worse so we can populate the world with even more sheeple who have even more iphones.

"...some people want to keep making that worse so we can populate the world with even more sheeple who have even more iphones."

That sentence is horrible. We're talking about living, breathing, thinking human beings not "sheeple". And to equate people who have dreams, hopes, and aspirations to a lot of mindless animals whose only desire is to destroy the planet and play on iphones is an egregious misrepresentation of reality.

If we want to make our planet better for all its inhabitants we need to be clear and honest about the facts and our goals. I happen to think our primary goal should be human flourishing, self-actualization and happiness. If you think our primary goal should be the elimination of species extinction or something else - I don't want to put words in your mouth - we could discuss that...

Ecological protection is not necessarily mutually exclusive with human development. And human beings are massively reliant on those ecosystems in subtle and important ways. Your point seems like a false dichotomy. We just need to approach problems in an environmentally literate way.

It's not a false dichotomy, because the above poster isn't presenting a dichotomy at all. We'd all like to see human flourishing AND ecological protection. Sometimes those goals interfere with each other, and sometimes they don't. In the cases where they do, we can ask: which is our _highest_ priority? If we had the choice between saving the human species and nuking the planet, or going extinct to save the extant ecosystem on Earth, which should we choose?

That's the point being made. Nobody's trying to say that all actions live on a 1-D spectrum between "environment preserving" and "human promoting". That's obviously untrue. I don't think anybody needs reminding that humans can't flourish if the Earth is a barren desert.

If you take out the sheeple statement, then he has a strong point. Look at any graph of the human population or energy use and you'll see the former skyrocketing in the last 300 years and the latter rising even faster than that.

This is unsustainable. But on an individual human level, we don't want to sacrifice the lifestyle we have. And many religious people will not use birth control.

If this was a graph of any asset in a market, would you take a long or short position?

Habitats are being destroyed through everything from logging to overfishing to melting ice. This is a serious planet-wide risk. Already the number of species gone extinct is larger than in the previous million years combined, I believe.

Humans have flourished too much; we're killing the planet. If anything, we should focus on constraining ourselves. What took millions or billions of years to evolve is in the process of begin destroyed in a few hundred years. On a geological timescale we're the equivalent of a bomb going off.

" its per capita electricity consumption is about one-quarter of, say, France or Belgium."

Its in the bottom quartile worldwide I believe.

Also the recommendations for the USA are way off. The "only way" to reach this goal is apparently to build lots of wind and solar. No mention whatsoever of nuclear, which is by far the more practical solution. And far less ecologically damaging.

> No mention whatsoever of nuclear, which is by far the more practical solution. And far less ecologically damaging.

I vaguely follow developments in this area, and this seems to either outdated or simply untrue information.

The people building traditional nuclear don't seem to be able to do so economically, even when they punt on insurance and eventual disposal.

The people building the new nuclear which is going to eat up all the old nuclear waste don't seem to be making much progress, even in China where you'd assume they'd quite happily take a chance if this was anywhere near a viable state.

Meanwhile, solar and wind are here today and prices continue to plummet. Any sensible economic or ecological assement would take into account the fact you can have solar up and running and contributing money/carbon savings on very short timescales, and do so in a distributed fashion, whereas you're talking potentially decades for nuclear which arrives all at once in a big lump.

The ecological damage is not outdated info. Solar farms are essentially clear-cutting the land. No sun - no life. The ecosystem under the panels is completely disrupted. Not unlike strip-mining.

You make it sound like solar farms are blocking off 100% of the solar radiation over the areas they cover. Have you actually seen any large solar installations? At the ones I've seen in the Mojave desert and Central Valley of California, the actual panels never cover 100% of the surface and a lot of backscatter light gets in even in the shade. I am not an ecologist but it seems like the effect would be more like having a bunch of trees in the desert.

They do tend to remove the underbrush from around the panels, probably because it's easier to install/maintain that way. You could make a case for allowing more vegetation around/under the panels.

What do you propose then?

Its obvious that any kind of human activity will produce some kind of alteration to the surrounding environment.

Kill the whole planet with greenhouse gases or kill a small and already almost sterile area?

I think the OP would lean towards small scale reactors which have a minimal footprint.

Measured by fatalities per k/W generated, nuclear is by far the safest form of power. The fear of nuclear is irrational.

"Fatalities per kw" is terrible risk management. I really wish nuclear activists would stop making crappy arguments.

Risk analysis has two axis - likelihood, and impact. The maximum potential impact of solar/wind plant failure is negligible - what's it going to do, fall over on someone? Meanwhile, the maximum potential impact of virtually any civilian nuclear plant is massive - release of toxins and carcinogens over large residential areas, rendering them uninhabitable.

Any respectable risk analysis requires looking at impact, not just likelihood.

I guess I don't follow your reasoning.

The long term data (over decades) shows that nuclear kills fewer people than other forms of power generation. Maybe that will change over time (fewer people falling off of roofs when installing solar).

That data includes "high impact" events, including things like Fukushima, which evidently has not resulted in any radiation-related fatalities.

I'm not just measuring fatalities. I'm measuring economic costs. A nuclear accident can render a city uninhabitable, even if no one dies.

edit: An additional risk is that a nuclear plant is much more complex and expensive than a solar plant. A major accident, if nothing else, wrecks the plant, taking away a key resource that could take a decade and billions of dollars to rebuild (if it's politically possible to rebuild at all). Solar and wind, made up of collections of small units, can't suffer the same kind of unrecoverable catastrophic failure. Again, economic risk.

And yet another risk... because of the potential destructive nature, nuclear plants are obvious targets for terrorists and military action. This ties back to the ability to disable a plant and its impact. Even if it doesn't cause fatalities, taking a nuclear plant offline and forcing evacuations isn't that hard. High, high economic risk.

This is another example of your original mistake. You're narrowly focusing, and not doing a solid risk analysis. Nuclear power is riskier than solar, because the potential impact of failure is much higher.

> release of toxins and carcinogens over large residential areas

Thought experiment: how big of a nature-only walled-off preserve would we need around a nuclear plant in order to protect against that? And if that amount of area were instead covered with solar panels, how much energy would that produce?

My impression given the efficiency of nuclear is that it'd still win, plus you get a sweet nature reserve out of it.

I'm all for investment in nuclear but it would take a really bloody colossal nature preserve. The Chernobyl exclusion zone is only 2,600 km^2 but about 3,900,000 km^2 of Europe - about 40% of it's total land mass - was contaminated with caesium-137 after that disaster and about 2% of Europe was contaminated to 'high' levels. Even as far away as the UK there are restrictions on hundreds of farms related to that radiation.

Source: http://www.chernobylreport.org/?p=summary

The fear is irrational, but so is the cost. Nuclear always comes in over budget and with far greater construction delays than any other generation type.

Even if you were to start on new reactors today, it would take a decade to complete them; a whole lot of wind and solar are going to be deployed in a decade.

I'd submit that those cost overruns are driven in part by the irrational fear.

It has made it politically difficult to research and deploy safer and more cost-effective reactors.

Unless its a desert area. Like most of Australia, Central Asia, North Africa etc.

This again. For some reason the ecosystem of the desert is assumed to be worthless, and undeserving of preservation. This is an armchair ecologist idea that won't die.

In fact the desert ecosystem is more sensitive to sunlight changes. Which makes sense when you think about it.

Which is not where the majority of solar energy is being deployed. The world leaders in solar energy production are the EU and China : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country.

China has huge deserts. The Gobi and the Taklamakan cover a massive area of China.

Edit: According to wikipedia, only 14.8% of China's land is arable. And that is for a country that is about the same size as the United States.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geography_of_China

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Deserts_of_China

There are numerous parking lots and parking structures, I'm gathering from your comment these are not big enough to make maintenance cost-effective compared to dedicated farms? Is anyone working on the problem of remotely-performed maintenance of multiple solar panel installations to reduce the maintenance labor footprint at each site?

The problem with nuclear is that we can't trust the people running it to follow instructions without failure for decades in a row. Sooner or later a politician shows up and demands an experiment to be done, or maintenance to be postponed.

Failures are rare, but the failure mode is catastrophic.

The biggest problem with nuclear is that it's too expensive. Even after massive subsidies, it's more expensive than unsubsidized renewable alternatives would be.

And the worst part for nuclear is that while solar and wind are getting significantly cheaper, nuclear is getting more expensive.

Finally, the major costs for solar/wind at the moment is storage. With electric cars, and the fact that nearly every consumer company is spending money towards cheaper electricity storage, it's just a significantly better bet at the moment.

Curious why nuclear is going up? It would seem anything scientific or technically advanced would over time trend down.

Modern nuclear plants are more expensive but also much safer.

We have had 6 and half decades now of successful operation in the US.

Are we conveniently ignoring Three Mile Island? It happened in 1979, 37 years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island_accident

The only causality of TMI was the atmosphere. The following fear-mongering lead to and effective halt in the expansion of nuclear power.

Sodium salt / thorium reactors fail by ... stopping cold. So that's the way to go.

The same could be said for Hydro Dams. When they fail it is catastrophic.

Totally agree. Teton Dam failure in the US killed 11 people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdOGPBnfoKE

How about 171,000 people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam

Indeed, hydro has pretty bad faikure mode. Still, we're not talking about massively irradiated fallouts, the impact is contained booth in space and in time.

>No mention whatsoever of nuclear, which is by far the more practical solution. And far less ecologically damaging.

The UK's new Hinckley point power plant is both more expensive than solar/wind and puts the UK's energy generation in Chinese hands.

There's a reason why Angela Merkel (relevant: probably the only physicist head of state) decided to shift to wind and solar.

Angela Merkel didn't decide to shift to wind and solar. The Atomaustieg (the decision to abandon nuclear power) was made in 2000 by a coalition of the social democrats and the greens. The movement that lead to this decision goes back to the 70s, the green party actually stems from that.

Merkel slowed down that process at a time where it stopped being that much of an issue and the process was put back on the initial schedule after Fukushima happened.

Merkel is merely going with popular opinion on this.

> Angela Merkel (relevant: probably the only physicist head of state)

That's actually fascinating. She was a physical chemist research scientist, not just undergraduate [1]. I wonder how many other scientist heads of state there have been.

Margaret Thatcher was a research chemist (food scientist) [2], but that's the only other one I know of.

Edit: she was the first British Prime Minister with a Science degree [3].

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Merkel 
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher
  [3]: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n11/david-runciman/rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat

Well it might be but Theresa May still has a chance to veto it...

I'm not up-to-date with nuclear. Is waste storage and disposal now a solved problem? Last I heard it had to be stored in hollowed-out mountains, walled in with concrete.

Thorium reactors may have little waste, with a short halflife. Any modern design will work better than the decrepit plants that are responsible for so much regulation and fear.

How much of that is down to climatological differences?

Would never work in the US because hydropower is not considered renewable.

"But in general, hydropower is not even considered a renewable energy in most states or, for the most part, by the federal government. "

http://www.governing.com/topics/transportation-infrastructur...

Hydropower is somewhat environmentally questionable, but it's "renewable" by any reasonable definition. Your link confirms this:

...because it is an endless, constantly recharging system, hydropower is defined as a renewable energy by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Unfortunately it isn't exactly endless. Even if you ignore the decreasing amounts of water at many dams due to climate change, eventually dams fill up with sediment. Lake Powell and Lake Mead already have about 10% less capacity than they did when built due to sediment infill.

Dams aren't endless, but no human artifact is. It is totally within design parameters to have to drain and excavate (and perhaps patch the cracks in the dam) every hundred years or so. The rain will still fall.

Actually one expects that aquatic sediment-removing robots will eventually be created to obviate this basic maintenance task, but that sort of assumes that humans will want dams in future. It's possible that they'll develop cheap energy without the drawbacks inherent in hydropower, and decide that rivers are better than artificial lakes.

You might RTFA, which points out that it "would never work" because it's already working—the US has already tapped most of its available hydroelectric power.

And even at 6% it is by far the largest chunk of the renewable energy production in the US.

Quebec has gone about 50 years.

I think your offhand comment deserves more attention, so here is a link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydro-Qu%C3%A9bec

As has Norway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Norway

Main problem with hydropower is it's geographical dependency. Denmark could never do what Norway is doing for example.

Well, it could. But it would have to dig a hell of a hole....

Denmark is utilising a resource it has in some abundance: wind. Part of a renewables strategy is using what you've got, not what you wish for.

Well, solidly 95% of Quebec's electricity is from hydro-electric. It still keeps other types of power plants online for research purposes.

We are lucky to have big rivers far north. This allowed us to destroy entire ecosystems and native lands where nobody could see or hear about it.

Hydro electricity is not without its downside.

Costa Rica also sits on the Ring of Fire like I do here in East Java, so geothermal is accessible there.

Costa Rica did not have to maintain a standing army to protect its borders thanks in large part to relying on treaties and understandings with the US. This frees up some of their GDP for R&D into sustainable energy.

I wonder what the demand for electricity is in Costa Rica today compared to when I was last there in 1993. I was going to buy land then, but I was a bit wary of new laws on foreign-owned properties. It would have cost me a lot to bribe/pay my way to getting power distributed to my land. I was going to use a generator and solar panels anyway. Many people kept guns to defend their property from bandits in my travels there back then. I'm sure it has changed a lot. Selva Verde was my first 'eco-tourist' experience, and I remember talking to some of the worker's there, and the owner's daughter. I am glad to see the business model took off. It's a beautiful country.

>Costa Rica did not have to maintain a standing army to protect its borders thanks in large part to relying on treaties and understandings with the US.

As a non-american, I never understood what's up with this. Is it voluntary? Are they an independent nation?

It's a completely independent country that simply chooses not to have an army. 60 years ago they decided that money would be better off being invested in their population, and now they are a posterchild for stable democracy, the wealthiest centroamerican country, and consistently ranked one of the happiest countries in the world.

I think you are discounting their dependence on the US and other countries to protect them; they didn't decide without these assurances in place. The US forgave a lot of their debt in 2007 in exchange for protecting their rainforests. The US is their largest trading partner.

Mess with Costa Rica, and the US Armed Forces 'will most likely' stand against you.

The US Coast Guard can operate off their shores because of the Drug War and an agreement with Costa Rica.

It's never simple.

The decision to disband their army came in 1948 after a civil war -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_of_Costa_Rica

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rican_Civil_War

That sounds very nice :).

How come noone with even a tiny fleet sails over there and takes it over? Any billionaire could become a king that way.

They'd still have to hold the country, but actually that happened to a city in the next country north, when a William Walker decided to be president of Nicaragua:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Walker_(filibuster)

Very good, this is a great step, but just a thing to be remembered: hydroelectric energy is renewable, better than coal, oil, etc, but it still kills a lots of animals and flood great areas, disappearing with waterfalls and changing landscapes.

I prefer changing landscapes over wasting landscapes, Fukushima-style. There are always tradeoffs, but some are better than the others.

While a minor but noticeable uptick in radiation-induced cancer is unacceptable for humans, animals don't especially seem to mind. The areas around Chernobyl have become a superb wildlife reserve, and Fukushima is probably on its way to a similar state. Compared to the area submerged by a dam -- where the habitat is, without hyperbole, utterly and completely annihilated -- I have difficulty seeing how you can prefer that.

> animals don't especially seem to mind.

They do mind, they mind a lot, it's just that for the vast majority of wildlife humans (land alterations, activity and presence byproduct) have an even larger effect than a touch of long-term radiation-induced lethal disease.

I think the point was more that nature seemed to adapt very quickly to the fallout from Chernobyl. Instead of a nuclear wasteland it's a pretty thriving ecosystem with a lot of new life, and even large mammals seem to be doing just fine.

I caught a documentary while on a transatlantic flight about the Wolves of Chernobyl [1], and it discusses how the wildlife seems to be thriving with few to no ill effects.

This isn't me suggesting that irradiating the land with nuclear waste is good - far from it. But it does seem that nature is pretty resilient to it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkyM2XSVhBI

Wildlife does thrive in the exclusion zone, but again that's not because wildlife is somehow immune to radiations[0] it's because radiation-induced morbidity is lower than humanity-induced morbidity.

[0] they're not, though r-strategist will tend to be pretty resilient

Yea, I am sure the area submerged by a dam could equally rebound in its own way 30 years after.

Yea, and this happened in Chernobyl.

So then let's drop some atomic bombs and let some reactors explode for the sake of nature! Are you in?

North Korea might give it a try soon.

What landscape did Fukushima waste? Are you confusing Fukushima and the Tōhoku earthquake?

Hell, if Chernobyl is any indication, nuclear accidents tend to save landscapes more than they waste'em.

Or do you mean "waste" in the sense that humans can't wring them dry?

They are inhabitable zones for humans now and have a bad effect on a lot of other organisms. I think humanity has done harm to the whole ecosystem (including humans themselves) by beginning to use atomic energy.

> They are inhabitable zones for humans now

I'm guessing you mean uninhabitable (as in "humans can't live there").

That seems to be an excellent way to preserve the landscape.

> have a bad effect on a lot of other organisms.

Which, if the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone is any indication, is significantly lower than the effect humans have on most of these organisms.

> I think humanity has done harm to the whole ecosystem (including humans themselves) by beginning to use atomic energy.

Whereas I think humanity has done harm to just about everything by beginning to use fossil energy, and much larger civilian application of atomic energy would have been a significant improvement at pretty much all levels, including (and possibly especially because of, though they've really been much too rare for that) the odd nuclear accident.

Your inherent hatred for humanity fascinates me. I still have to grasp it. So Costa Rica is living on renewable energy now, strongly reducing any harm on any living beings, and you, at least that's what one could read in it, don't like it because this doesn't eliminate the space for humans as a good nuclear accident would do. Did I get it right?

Not really. They're uninhabitable only because of not-always-rational fear of radiation. People were fleeing from Japan because of Fukushima, and when doing so some of my countrymen returned here, where the natural background radiation is higher than in the affected area they ran away from.

When coming here, they went to an airplane which was high up in the sky and momentarily gave them an even higher dose of radiation.

Fukushima exclusion zone is a social phenomenon created by human fear, not physiological created by radiation.

If you think that, then of course the responsible thing to do is explore the issue with repeatable experiment and research to determine whether your thoughts reflect reality.

If anyone is wondering about the worldwide big picture of where electricity is coming from: I made this map / spreadsheet:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16K4gNhy_AN8Eg4Ov3z7p...

This is awesome, thank you!

Interesting to see people pick apart what constitutes renewable and base loads etc. It is an interesting milestone that some part of the planet can be lived in with electricity that is only from renewable sources. That's pretty neat, you can live there after civilization collapses (assuming you can displace whomever is already living there :-)

Its a huge boon for a nation state to reach the crossover point of 100% renewables. Then they can start to grow it from there. It is much harder for a nation-state to simply lose access to imported energy sources, then there is the whole rioting and anarchy until enough population dies off that the remaining start seeing the others as necessary for survival not a threat to it.

Same story every month. Can't wait for the 100 day update

Future 100 day update: We got 99 days before we had to fall back on non-renewable resources for a day. That's only a 99% fuel saving, which is not enough and means renewables are terrible and we should never try to use them again.

I think you misunderstood my comment. This article has been posted before when it was about 50 or 60 days. Now it appears again at 76 days. Why does the number of days matter?

>That's only a 99% fuel saving, which is not enough and means renewables are terrible and we should never try to use them again.

I love the fact that people imply there's some conspiracy to hold down renewable energy meanwhile nearly every country on the globe is subsidizing it.

I meant to reference the common (uneducated) perception that if there's ever any way that renewable resources fall short, that means they're useless. It's the same mindset that says that an electric car "only" has a range of 300-450km and takes a while to recharge, and therefore is useless as a vehicle because it can't do nonstop cross-country road trips.

In some places in Costa Rica the electricity can be sporadic, when it goes out people use petrol powered generators.

As great as this is and large step for other countries very soon, decarb can only be achieved through transport efforts. transport makes up over 1/3s of emissions so why residential/commercial consumption energy efficiency is great, it is a tiny fraction of achieving overarching goal

Feels like the article was written by a pro-renewable reporter and edited by an oil-company exec. "Yeah they did it but you should be discouraged instead of hopeful."

It shows both sides and they're important to consider. You don't need to be in favor of oil or any fossil fuel to see that there remains a vacuum that needs to be filled somehow.

>"Yeah they did it but you should be discouraged instead of hopeful."

Probably because a tiny, relatively poor country that happens to have access to geography suitable for hydro power isn't particularly impressive in my eyes. Especially considering that, according to the article, just 2 years ago they experienced a drought and had to up their usage of diesel generators. Where were these reports then?

Objection: Geothermal technically isn't renewable.

I mean technically solar isn't renewable, on long enough time scales.

Geothermal is solar

'Geo' means earth. It's heat produced from the earth.

Geothermal, as with solar power, taps into an extant energy flux, rather than, as with fossil fuels and nuclear fission, stocks which are depleted with time.

There's a long discussion of this, dating to the late 18th century, though it's long been ignored and/or suppressed within mainstream economics. You'll find a healthy discussion in ecological or environmental studies circles, however.

Vaclav Smil in general does some of the better quantitative treatments of the problem.

Geothermal also produces radioactive waste! Water gets pumped into the ground, becomes steam, the steam rises, and is used to generate power. The steam brings with it toxic sludge, which needs to be disposed of. Not sure why, but they don't wanna pump the sludge back into the ground.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geothermal_power#Environmental...

Maybe they are afraid of earthquakes, like how they are realizing that fracking wastewater wells are causing many [1]

1. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-07/oklahoma-w...

Depends on the location. In some places, people bathe in the water after it gets pumped into the ground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Lagoon_(geothermal_spa)

Every fucking day I see this posted. Can we just update when they aren't using 100% renewable energy again.

Nothing important to say here, except, I just LOVE Costa Rica!

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