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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

Except we don't need to stop burning fuel, right? We just need to stop using it for net energy.

With enough "free" electricity we can "buy" fuels via carbon sequestration, and you can run your (somewhat pricier) camp stove as much as you want.

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Or you can turn electricity and air and water into hydrocarbons only slightly less efficiently than you can turn electricity and water into hydrogen. This'll give you oil at something like $300 or $400 a barrel at current electricity prices. Which is to say that it's really energy that's the problem.

Energy is not the problem. Enough sunlight hits earth every 5 minutes to power the entire world for a year. Energy storage and energy density are the problems.

And energy transportation.

Yes, agreed. That can be solved with transmission lines, we just need to start building them.

Curious. Could we build transmission lines over existing freight tracks across the US? And have them serve double-duty? Both transporting power up top at very high voltages, and down below providing traction power to locomotives?

I saw another post in an HN thread today - it reminded me that sending electricity by wire over long distances is costly - you use something like 1% of the electrical load for every kilometer you send it.

With that kind of efficiency, I'm wondering how much energy it would take to ship a container of batteries across the country - how many kWh could you store in 45,000 lbs of lithium? That might be explosive or otherwise prohibitive, so what about 45,000 lbs of nickel cadmium?

Maybe we've been looking at energy transmission backwards, and we should be shipping it the way we ship everything else? And if we put the container on your train, it could power the train too.

Yes, but that is the equivalent of surveying a flooded city and declaring that the water isn't the problem, it's location is. The reality is that our society depends on expending massive quantities of energy to do work, and we've been wallowing in extraordinarily energy dense, stable, transportable happy juice for almost almost 150 years. It took 4+ billion years to make the stuff, and by all accounts we've used a good portion of it in a century and a half. It's like putting sugar next to an anthill. Fun times for the ants until the sugar is gone.

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