We Need an Energy Miracle (2015)(theatlantic.com) |
We Need an Energy Miracle (2015)(theatlantic.com) |
Grid-scale storage is the key. Duke Energy is one of the leaders in this effort, at least among the major utilities [1].
Energy has moved down the priority list of problems.
But no wind power does not work in large scale in a electric system. The problem is that you need to have a lot of extra power and power electronics to stabilize the effect of wind power. It disturbs the frequency of the electricity in the network and you have to balance it with other sources you have complete control over to keep the power stable.
When the Swedish energy department made a study they found that we can't have more than 10 TWh of wind power (7%)[0]. There is one study from one group that says that we can have up to 30 TWh (21%)[2], but if we are realistic it's probably in the middle. This is things my professors in wind power told us, and they really like wind power.
Sorry the sources are in Swedish, but I really advice you to look into the subject before calming that it's all perfect.
[0] http://www.svk.se/siteassets/om-oss/rapporter/20130313-integ...
[1]http://fof.se/tidning/2012/7/tal-elnatet-mer-vindkraft Lennart Söders forskargrupp.
There's actually a single giant windfarm due for completion in 2020 that on its own will provide more than 8%.
There are some reasons to think solar and wind have physical limits and can't provide 100% on their own (or even together) economically just as nuclear on its own doesn't really make economic sense, but there's a long history of groups predicting false limits based on strange assumptions.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/06/07/uk-sets-new-r...
I don't understand how the HN crowd that is usually so pro-environment, is also happy with the tons of wasted energy from crytptocurrency mining.
> What is particularly unfortunate about Gates’ mistaken rhetoric is that it can disempower people and policymakers and pundits into thinking that individual or even government action is not the central weapon needed to win the climate fight and that our only hope is some long-term deus ex machina strategy to avoid catastrophic warming. Nothing could be worse than leaving people with the impression that humanity’s only hope is future miracles...
> What is particularly ironic about Gates’ mistaken energy-miracle-centered strategy, as I’ll discuss at the end, is that it is the exact opposite of the deployment-driven innovation strategy Gates himself used to make Microsoft a software giant and to make personal computers the “miracle” that Gates calls them today.
Personally, I've found Gates's public pronouncements unhelpful as they've promoted this idea that the current tech is of no use when simple things like replacing coal with natural gas can have large impacts.
Interconnections reduce the effects of renewable variability.
We usually see things coming a long way off. We were burning coal just like wood - and the entire hydrocarbon industry is a big refinement on 'coal fires'.
Nuclear Energy has been vastly understudied in the last 30 years. There are so many opportunities there, and the 'yield' is earth-shaking: 1000 years of electricity.
Yes - I'm aware of the issues, but with the right approach, most of them, possibly all of them can be mitigated.
Just with '1980's tech' - and some institutional responsibility (A big 'ask', I know) - we could wipe out climate change for a hefty, but not unreasonable price tag. (FYI - a huge new component factored into costs is 'insurance' for these plants, which is crazy expensive and hard to assess - in addition to improvements - we can legislate and plan around these things).
At very least - we should be investing in research both in tech, but also in operating modalities. The upside is too great to ignore.
Decentralized energy production means loss of control.
If I could be so bold: every piece of tech in your house depends in some way on military R&D.
Heyzeus - you even owe 'canned food' to Napoleon's supply-chain R&D.
It's a surprisingly long list when you account for actual history, not just the 20th century, which was huge.
There are two reasons for this:
1. The stability of the petrodollar global control grid is based on the centralized production of energy. Any tech that would lead to widespread decentralization is a threat. Power is power.
2. People are too retarded and selfish to be trusted with unlimited energy. They would inevitably split the crust of the earth and kill us all.
So until both of those things change you won't see permanent batteries, cheap hydrogen from water, high efficiency solar, or any of the other energy tech they are sitting on.
The societal gain from these technologies is potentially very large and will hopefully realign interests in the direction of saving the environment rather than bailing out businesses.. But the most sane definition of money is actually energy imo
Also comparing the energy cost of printing physical money with mining cryptocurrencies is favorable to CC's iirc.
There's infrastructure costs, but Visa's network doesn't need that much to process a single POST request
Really? Last I checked, taking the averaged of the top 10 most efficient mining setups, BitCoin network was pulling 9GW+.
https://twitter.com/layoric/status/906087502414352384
Another model here showing 18 TWh annual usage, that's still an insane amount of power.
https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Proof of Work (and BitCoin in particular) is so damaging, really hoping another currency takes over that doesn't use so much power for 4 transactions per second..
Or put differently, it's replacing a system that's O(log n) with respect to energy usage with a system that's O(n²), for questionable benefits.
Iirc that's one of the points of proof-of-stake. PoS is nearly analogous to PoW in its platform implications - potential for centralization due to resource costs and so on - but doesn't rely on burning through processing power to be secured.
[1] http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-cheapest/
[2] https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Proof-of-Stake-FAQ#doe...
“Bitcoin's electricity consumption as a percentage of the world's electricity consumption 0.09%“
How about Bill Gates and Terrapower trying to build a new generation of nuclear power in China?
https://qz.com/627113/bill-gates-says-china-is-the-best-plac...
I beg to differ - currently just Bitcoin mining uses as much energy as country of Iceland - anything consuming energy on a scale of entire country (even small one yes) is environmentally significant.
Yes and that the UK peaked at 28% is irrelevant ( EDIT: I used to harsh wording, yes it's a bit relevant but there are still problems with applying one solution to another place ) because they have different system with different possibilities. You can't implement the same systems everywhere since they have different conditions.
Maybe we can have almost exclusively power by wind in the future. But until then I prefer to listen to scientists and hear what they have to say.
My disagreement with this analysis is twofold:
- The capital that PoS burns has been created by switching to PoS. It's measured in ETH, and it's that extra value that hn commentors are referring to when they snidely remark that PoS is a good way to deflate your currency.
- The negative externalities of power consumption for PoW are both murderous and civilization-threatening. PoS has basically zero negative externalities.
The problem is that we might lack enough time for this to work.
The problem is that we might lack enough time for this to work.
Alas... barring that miracle at least, and probably a few more like it.
http://moltensalt.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ref...
And where is the comparison vs physical money? You know, with trucks moving around every day, and the cost of insurance, special facilities, salaries, etc...
Given a retail worker might cost a business $.03 per minute, you are looking at 1c per transaction. Now let's look at BTC. At 9GW when I looked at it, it was processing ~4.5, lets say 5, transactions per second. A kilo-watt-hour (kWh) of electricity will wholesale for 6c. If we are doing 5tx/s, that's 18000 in 1 hour. 9GWh to do 18000 transactions
(9,000,000,000) / (3600 * 5)
Gives us, 500 kWh per transaction, at 6c gives us $30 per transaction.
You might be able to argue subsequent cash handling might take a few minutes per transaction handles, but even so.
So given cash transactions save at least $20 per transaction, cost of transport and storage IMO would be negligable. These costs drop further with something like credit card transactions.
The two biggest problems I see with BitCoin and most PoW currencies (and I'm going to single out BitCoin) are;
1. BitCoin has a maximum transaction speed well below what is required for a world (or country/more localised) enconomy, 7 Tx/s doesn't cut it. VISA apparently does well over 1000+. 2. As mining gets harder, and as the network tries to reach the theoretical transaction speed limit, energy usage grows even more out of control.
9GW is such a massive amount of electricity at the moment. Even as solar + wind + storage becomes cheaper to build and capacities grow, it'll still be a huge amount of electricity and there usage by the BitCoin network will only grow. This is more electricity usage than the state of NSW in Australia _generates_ most of the time. That powers the residential and commercial electrical needs of a 1st world state with 7.5M people.
I think the more cheap power that is available to currencies like BTC, they'll keep using more and more with diminishing returns.
Besides, a single truck can move millions of dollars, and I doubt reaching out to take my money and then making change contributes very much to the salary of a shop keeper. Probably far less than scanning my phone and waiting an hour for 3 confirmations. The only way a cash transaction would use the same power as a Bitcoin one would be if I had to personally drive the money 1000 miles to its destination in a Tesla.
There is an absolute initial cost, but then there is none. CC servers (and digital banking in general) needs a permanent upkeep of power.
I think the cost for paper money is neglible. Coins however is more interesting. Their face value tends to be less, yet weight is substantial compared to a paper bill.
Here I can see more an argument for cost.
This actually was very relevant going back a bit in history when we used silver and gold for money. You get a whole issue of material cost vs it's face value as well.
In case of heavy deflation, people might just melt pennies (copper) and sell them for other (ie. international) currency. To increase the person's actual buying power.
There's also a general argument to be made for copper and in the past gold for currency, as these materials hold an inherit value for their atomic makeup and it's applicable use which simply can't be justified/compared vs it's value as a human usable currency.
In general, both currencies have their values.
Physical: needs no power upkeep, nor situational power and data connection to work.
This is great for reliability.
A nice thing about digital currency though, is the power we get. Instant transfer over physical irrelevant distances is pretty nice.
Another nice thing is I feel more comfortable with just 20 bucks cash. If I wanted to go out in a world without digital transfers, I would carry a lot with me, for the drinks, the food, buy a situational ticket for some party you come across, money for a taxi/train.
In a world without digital currency, "hitting jackpot" for a robber is statistically absolutely higher, and thus it would potentially increase crime levels quite a bit.
By definition 0.09% is not significant. Eliminating it would not significantly impact climate change.
Would you optimize a program by refactoring a function that used 0.09% of the execution time?
I don't think our technology is so advanced that producing 18TWh of energy per year can be done without impact on environment.
“Bill Gates has committed his fortune to moving the world beyond fossil fuels and mitigating climate change”
Back to my original comment: “You derailed the entire point of the article by taking a tangent into a completely different...”
If we move beyond fossil fuels and use 100% wind, solar, and nuclear energy, for example, does the electricity use for Bitcoin matter?
Think about it, almost a thousandth of world's electricity consumption completely wasted on BTC alone.
“if it's green code,..”
My point is that you don’t start by looking for 0.09% improvements when you’re profiling your code.
As for climate change, we are looking for cleaner energy options. The world’s energy use is going to increase greatly as billions more come out of poverty. China, for example, is going to increase nuclear energy to be almost on par with the US over the next decade:
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/09/china-will-more-than-d...
counterpoint: 0.09 is a lot of money for one person
the rebuttal has zero to do with the point given and even less to do with the overall thread about mining being wasteful.