Hacker News Reader

Comment by zenexer | Hacker News Reader

It doesn’t really matter how much electricity you consume if it’s coming from the sun. 1J of energy is 1J of energy. If the sun just hits the desert floor, it’ll heat up the earth immediately. If you collect the energy and convert (some of) it to electricity, whatever’s converted successfully won’t heat up the planet immediately, but it’ll end up back in the form of heat eventually.

There’s really no benefit to decreasing consumption of electricity. There’s no difference between decreasing demand by 1W and increasing solar output by 1W.

View on HN

> There’s really no benefit to decreasing consumption of electricity. There’s no difference between decreasing demand by 1W and increasing solar output by 1W.

This ignores the sunlight that reflects back into space, and if conversion into electricity and slow return to heat actually increases the amount of energy that the planet can effectively absorb.

At some level, it's just a question of if the planet would heat up by painting the deserts black -- and I suspect that the answer is "yes".

Interesting point. I’m not sure there’s really any way I can estimate the difference there.

> 1J of energy is 1J of energy. If the sun just hits the desert floor, it’ll heat up the earth immediately. If you collect the energy and convert (some of) it to electricity, whatever’s converted successfully won’t heat up the planet immediately, but it’ll end up back in the form of heat eventually.

This is also true for water. I'm not sure exactly what you're saying.

I’m not seeing how water is relevant here. OP seems to think decreasing demand is better than increasing supply. I’m not convinced that it is, though another reply comparing it to painting deserts back does raise a fairly good point.

What is your 1W of electricity going to do though? It going to power something, lets say a phone, so the phone needs building in a factory, with materials mined and pumped from the ground.

Electricity use implies 'stuff'. Our production of 'stuff' is nowhere near being environmentally sound.

So 1W hitting the desert floor is nothing like 1W hitting a solar panel.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com