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Comment by mrpopo | Hacker News Reader

Solar power is 1.68% of the USA's primary energy mix in 2021. Wind is 3.89%, about 2.5% more than a decade ago, and the trend is not accelerating that fast.

It is not even 3 decades to 2050, which is the USA's target date for net zero carbon, so with conservative estimates primary energy from wind should increase by at least 10% per decade, so 4 times faster than last decade.

Where is the vast abundance of renewable energy that you are talking about? Now is not the time for deploying another massively wasteful technology just because some people want to go on road trips without taking a 30 min break (a recent EV fast charge does not take hours) every few hours.

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I don’t think those extrapolations are totally fair. You’re assuming today’s technology is frozen, inflexible, and adoption is going to linear. If we have learned anything from the last decade it is that adoption curves are getting steeper.

If you recall from my original post, I said nothing about that hypothetical, abundant hydrogen being born from any particular source, but I did have solar in mind specifically. I personally think solar cells and panel arrays will get more efficient at producing power that we will eventually have a global excess. If we have grids producing renewable electricity when conditions allow, they can redirect some of the excess energy and use electrolysis to produce hydrogen creating energy reserves for when the power source is not available to them.

Hydrogen is still not super efficient because we have not even scratched the surface of optimizing it’s consumption. If we had concerted efforts towards that goal, we can get it to work for us in ways we never thought possible. I don’t think lugging around large batteries is the future, rather our fuel storage needs will be met by hydrogen tanks.

I'm not assuming linear adoption. I explicitly said that even if adoption was FOUR TIMES faster than now, the amount of renewable energy would barely reach the same amount of primary energy as we use now by 2050.

This is a optimistic scenario. Current trend is mostly linear. See:

Wind power generation, world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/wind-generation?tab=chart...

Solar power generation, world: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-energy-consumption?...

You can choose linear/log, it doesn't look exponential to me.

Add to this the fact that primary energy generation is increasing all over the world, so the share of renewables is increasing even less.

The target is 2050. There is no R&D that will get rid of electrolysis and Carnot cycles by then. Maybe by the end of the century if you want. But for the next 30 years, batteries will be in the lead.

Some updated figures through 2021 Solar = 2.8% Wind = 9.2%

Total renewables = 20.1%, that includes hydro which may not be as renewable as we thought.

Just had this discussion but relative to why not re-invest in nuclear so we looked up the amount of nuclear energy (~20%).

Not sure if we are looking at different sources, they are counted differently, etc.

Source for this is; https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

Your source is counting the share of electricity generation. My source[0] is counting the share of primary energy; including fuel, heating, etc. I believe the latter is more relevant for the current discussion (CO2 emissions and cars). Electricity is not even half of our primary energy use.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

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