Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrianN | Hacker News Reader

We're not running out of easy energy at all. Renewable energy is quite easy and we'll never run out while the sun has hydrogen left. Economic growth has increasingly been decoupled from increases in energy use (at least in developed nations).

View on HN

The energy is there but it’s too expensive to extract store and distribute compared to Saudi Arabian oil. Hydrocarbons are not just a source of energy. They are also a storage mechanism that can also fuel their own transportation and distribution. There’s probably not enough rare minerals on the earth to build enough batteries to take care of all global transportation, electricity and heating let alone future needs.

Nuclear - fission and then fusion are the only way out.

I don't think you want to use our current battery tech to store large amounts of energy. I'd go with hydrogen or perhaps synthetic methane instead, because we can reuse much of the existing natural gas infrastructure.

Hydrogen is a potential solution but it’s very difficult to store and transport.

It's a little more difficult to store and transport than methane, yes. If that turns out to be a deal breaker, you can always upgrade the hydrogen to methane using atmospheric CO2. You lose a bit of efficiency, but perhaps that's cheaper than upgrading the storage and transport infrastructure.

These steps reduce the efficiency of the fuel.

Yes, I said that. Efficiency doesn't matter, only cost matters. They correlate, but they're not the same.

you done need rare earth minerals to store energy at a massive scale you need more of those https://www.electricmountain.co.uk/ but those aren't cheap, wont be build by private industry, and is so ancient a technology that the startup scene will play no part in it.

Otherwise you are right the really big problem right now is that we don't have a suitable replacement for oil that wont also change society in ways nobody is willing to deal with yet.

Fission is not going to be small and safe enough to really replace oil, fusion does not yet exists in the real world, so were probably stuck with renewable untransportable energy infrastructure for any future growth.

Here’s some math

Electric mountain is pumped hydro electric storage. It can store 9 gigwatt hours of electricity.

The UKs total energy consumption is 1650 Terawatt hours. Let’s say you need to store 4 days worth of energy to account for any shocks. That’s 22 terawatt hours of energy.

You’d need to build 2500 electric mountains to store just 4 days of UK energy consumption. And 4 days is a dangerously low buffer for when things go wrong.

Rare Earth minerals? Today's batteries are wonders of using cheap, easily available "junk". Lithium the ingredient so important and prevalent it's in the name (Lithium-Ion batteries) is the third element on the Periodic table and per-boring chemistry reasons assuredly also the third most common in the universe since the big bang. Nickel is so common we named one of the most boring and cheapest units of US currency after it. Cobalt was a pretty/shiny "waste product" of Nickel and other mining, with a long history of being used for pretty blue paint.

None of those things are "rare earth minerals" by almost any definition and are relatively plentiful. Definitely none of them are in the zone on the Periodic table specifically named the "rare earth metals" either (though those are often important in magnetic machines like MRI scanners, so maybe you are confused about what part of the electromagnetic field batteries are typically working with?).

We need more Nickel than the known global reserves to make enough batteries to replace just transportation.

https://youtu.be/DU6gWZav2T8 (46 minutes into this video. Whole video is an eye opener)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com