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Comment by arthurofbabylon | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate the themes but find this overly conceptual. We can look at hard figures(†) and see errors in the prophecy. While yes this is a transformative period, I don't believe the author truly identifies the fulcrum; PV cells alone are proven insufficient, so society will need to turn upon many more points than just that one. The essay could be called The Pivots (plural) but then that would be less simple/sensational/optimistic and fall under the category of economics and social sciences.

I appreciate the thrust, however: the unsustainable status quo, corruption, the climate crisis' incredible severity, fragility. "efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience" is a particularly appreciated line.

(†) – Vaclav Smil's work comes to mind.

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Projections of PV cell improvement and deployment by large energy forecasting agencies have been so wrong for so long that it’s a well known running joke in the energy industry.

Solar beats projections constantly and has been the cheapest available power source for many (if not all) applications for years already. Cheap, abundant, performant batteries already expand the possible surface area for solar deployment, and we can expect this to continue.

I have a hard time understanding what you mean by “proven insufficient.”

"Proven insufficient" when scoped to the sweeping social changes proposed by the author. PV cells are obviously effective and increasingly so over time, but further efficiency gains will not on their own topple dictatorships or cure diseases.

To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.

It's a nice notion (and totally inline with the existing technocratic sentiment (eg, "more compute!")) that a single lever can just be pulled harder and problems will be magically solved. However, the world is much more complex than that; the complexity cannot be hand-waived away.

> To summon the vast proposed changes, PV cells' improvements need to be coincided with many other changes: grid development, battery tech, industrial re-tooling, climate policies/institutions, mining/extraction, agricultural methods, production methods... and that's without even discussing culture, which will have to evolve substantially.

What a ridiculous take. PV's are plug and play, you don't have to change anything. The only dependency is storage, so battery tech needs to keep up. However, advancements in battery tech are already progressing at a rate that exceeds the pace of innovation in PV cells.

Let's use our imagination to overcome some naivety. Imagine for a moment that you just instantly 10x'ed the presence of PVs and tell me what will change. Do you truly believe that you will never encounter a bottleneck? Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging constraints.

I'm sure that 10x the solar electricity output would substantially incentivize battery development and changes in industrial production, eventually producing major cultural implications. Long before utopia, however, we will encounter other bottlenecks: electrolysis, carbon policy, resource distribution (and other problems/opportunities worthy of attention).

No one here is claiming that PV cells play an insignificant role, or that emergent peripheral challenges will not be met with skill. The claim I am making is that the simple model (more PVs!) is insufficient to address the complex problems human society faces, and that it is naive to believe otherwise. You would never just put your foot on the pedal to drive to your destination; you'll also grasp the steering wheel, reckon with obstacles and roadway laws, etc; but if you have never driven a car before, you might sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that pedal.

> but if you have never driven a car before, you might sincerely believe that all it takes is stepping on that pedal.

This is not a fair comparison. Installing a PV system with battery storage on my residential or commercial property has minimal societal impact, especially when compared to something like owning a car. I generate and consume my own electricity in a largely self-contained system.

The primary benefit to society is indirect but meaningful: I reduce my reliance on fossil fuels and draw less power from the grid. This eases demand on shared infrastructure and contributes (modestly) to lower emissions.

Importantly, I continue to pay all applicable taxes and fees, so public services and infrastructure investments (like grid upgrades or transmission lines) remain unaffected. My pursuit of energy self-sufficiency doesn’t impose new burdens on society; if anything, it lightens the collective load.

I don't think you understand my argument. The point is not whether or not solar electricity generation is good or bad (it is obviously very favorable). The point I am making is that it is unhelpful to collapse complexity into a simplistic model.

Your discussion on owning battery + PV is illustrative. You are not in a vacuum and certainly are in relationship with the broader world: you paid for the system, you maintain it, you stopped buying something, you inspired your neighbors, you lowered the costs for your neighbors to implement a similar system, you reduced your and your countrymen's geopolitical dependencies, you may have saved some money you can spend elsewhere, you probably developed a working understanding of electricity in homes, your neighbors probably developed a better working understanding of electricity in homes, you are now less liable to extortion/persuasion from fossil fuel companies, you're now more likely to own an EV and reduce urban pollution. The entire point is that you exist in relationship; that is what makes it powerful. Had you simply implemented the PV system + battery without these second order effects (and only gained access to more/cheaper energy) you would have considerably less positive impact. The complex model is the correct working model that describes far more of the dynamics than the simplistic model.

My original point: belief in a single fulcrum when describing societal evolution is flatly misleading.

The metaphor of driving a car is not in opposition to solar; you misunderstood it. The point is, again, that the simple model is insufficient for effectively operating in the world.

Now, why would you have to make this point, as it's close to a tautology? It's likely because we have a lever and don't use it. In that framing your point gets lost, because it doesn't address any issue. So there is a superfluousness at play that suggests this is disinformation, intended to derail the impetus for change. So I guess you need to elaborate and present a synthesis, perhaps mention alternate levers, instead of downplaying the one that's obvious? I don't see any other significant levers, RethinkX says PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world. Grid demands should lessen over time as local generation comes online. The grid becomes a overnight backup charging method.

Let’s upgrade our intellectual rigor here. Do you sincerely believe that “PV + battery are sufficient for virtually anywhere in the world” even when it comes to viral disease, dictatorships and warfare, chemical pollution, deforestation, social epidemics (eg, drugs, social media), housing crises, food deserts, famine, etc?

You might be only considering the energy transition, but it is not as if the original author was strictly speaking of that topic, or as if that is all that matters for humanity on earth.

“I don’t see any other significant levers,” you say? Read from history: how about the great liberalizing effect of the Christian marriage and family policy that broke down filial kin networks and paved the way for markets, universities, and democracies by way of fostering impersonal trust? How about the smallpox vaccine? How about the incredible rise in population and economic activity upon the introduction of potatoes to Europe? How about the invention of ammonium-based fertilizers? This one will rankle some feathers: how about the incredible geopolitical twist and – yes – reduction in atmospheric carbon introduced by the development of fracking (enabling the transition away from coal)? How about the civil rights movement in the United States? The invention of nuclear weapons? Metallurgy? Chemistry? The shipping container? Large language models? Look around and you will see fulcrums everywhere.

Literally look around you, wherever you sit right now, and just consider the vast number of twists and turns that led to the current circumstance. Then imagine someone 500 years ago in Beijing saying something as foolish as, “we just need more movable-type printing, yeah, that will protect us from the Northern invaders, that will completely solve deforestation, that will protect us from famine… Hey you farmer over there, stop farming! We have movable-type printing! We’re good, we just need more of it!”

The simplistic model is very appealing; it is easy to wrap your mind around it, it is easy to communicate via viral essay, it is easy to develop optimism upon it. But it is not a working model. It is just too simple and incomplete. The various fulcrums I pulled out of my imagination above all worked because the world was complex. The people who invented and developed those fulcrums were effective because they embraced a complex model. They made the intellectually rigorous choice to reject naive simplicity when others tried to thrust it upon them.

> Go on 10x'ing the presence of PVs until you find emerging constraints.

While true, I think it's fair to make certain guesses about other tech also being developed (such as, as you mentioned, batteries).

Even if they did not exist, constraints lead to conflicts, and conflicts can lead to exchanges of power.

(Different topic but same idea, constraint and conflict: when it comes to the never-ending battle of encryption, I do not see how to square the unstoppable force of "unbreakable encryption is very easy to make and vitally important to the use of the internet" with the immovable object that is "no state can survive when conspiracies are opaque to investigations and prosecutions").

> I'm sure that 10x the solar electricity output would substantially incentivize battery development and changes in industrial production, eventually producing major cultural implications

This already happened

You only have to change every car, truck, tractor, water heater, clothes dryer, lawn mower, leaf blower, stove top, etc to be electric instead of using natural gas (ie electrfy everything), which likely requires all the changes that the parent mentioned. Also, not everyone has enough land to install enough PV to power their entire homes + transportation, so a lot of this is going to have to come from the grid, which requires changes in transmission which are being actively blocked by the current administration (see Grain Belt Express).

Well, to the extent that you accept that the current world organization is caused by oil, then yeah, PV is sufficient to reorganize it.

Some people just push that extent to a surreal level, implying worldwide conspiracies and etc. But the reverse is also true, some people dismiss it to a ridiculous level. Energy is the most fundamental constraint in our society, and a lot of seemingly independent things turn out to be caused by it when you look.

Anyway, from your list, the climate crisis is an obvious one that comes directly from energy. Energy centralization is also a boost for corruption, but the strength of that one is highly debatable.

China seems happy with the Power of Siberia pipeline and wants another: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altai_gas_pipeline Credit to those countries for not fighting each other, by the way!

So I agree, we can have all of the above: expansion of solar power, expansion of EVs and batteries, continued growth of fossil fuels, and climate disaster.

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