solarpunk memes

Since 2021, nearly 4 full years, the world has closed less than 1% of active coal power plants.

Closing will come later, when alternatives are widely available. What renewable energy does currently - at least here - is forcing those plants temporarily out of the market, especially during summer months and windy weather. The plants will exist and stay ready in case of need for well over a decade, maybe even two - but they will start up ever more rarely.

Technically, the deal is: we don't have seasonal energy storage. Short term storage is being built - enough to stabilize the grid for a cold windless hour, then a day, then a week... that's about as far as one can go with batteries and pumped hydro.

To really get the goods one has to add seasonal storage or on-demand nuclear generation. The bad news is that technologies for seasonal storage aren't fully mature yet, while nuclear is expensive and slow to build. There's electrolysis and methanation, there's iron reduction, there are flow batteries of various sorts, there's seasonal thermal storage already (a quarter step in the right direction)...

...but getting the mixture right takes time. Instead of looking at the number of closed plants, one should look at the sum of emissions. To remain hopeful, the sum should stop growing very soon.

From your link it, for me, it seems like emissions are platooning, similar to a technological S curve. Even if China and India are growing exponentially, reduction in other countries are enough to slow down the process significantly (specially if you zoom in in the last 10 years).

It’s very hard to predict change, but I suspect the deprecation of solutions that emit lots of emissions is about to skyrocket.

We might already have reached peak carbon emissions. There's also the thing where renewables are so much cheaper that it's in most countries best self interest to build renewables.

The thing the world is doing now is more energy but the cheapest one is electricity so more electricity. The duck curve is an energy storage opportunity that's being taken advantage of more and more. Things are heading in the right direction but it's not fast enough.

The next emissions on the chopping block are household heating and cement and low-med industrial heat with more advanced heat pumps or heat pumps set up in series.

I've decided to become cautiously optimistic recently the more I learn about how science is advancing the renewables despite governments sometimes being in the way.

Things just shifted instantly from "nothing needs to be done" to "nothing can be done."

Not just that, it’s a combination of factors. Sustainable thinking, independence, a connection to the world and self and much more.

I hate stocks, but I hope yours go to the moon!

You still need fertilizer and electricity that is less efficient than sunlight to grow indoors.

But somebody once gave terrible math about being able to feed a city from a vertical skyscraper farm and it's been latched onto very hard as a futurism solution.

Been growing plants for 30-years, using zero sunlight to full sunlight. The difference in energy use, manpower, all that, is stunning.

Food is food because it contains loads of energy. We eat corn not oak leaves. That energy has to be put into the plant, at a loss, to get energy out. TANSTAAFL, literally.

Interest in solar panels has skyrocketed, and yet at least 50% of the world population won't stop driving ICE cars to work every day any time soon. While the ocean surface temperatures are on an exponential trajectory.

A climate catastrophy with mass deaths is inevitable. I'd be preparing instead of sugar-coating.

And after a few billion humans die, we can deploy solar panels and start living sustainably.

It's like praising all the cabin cars getting repainted with eco-friendly paint while the train has already gone off the cliff and is plunging toward the ground.

CO2 emissions of the world excluding China have declined. Chinas emissions did fall in Q2 of this year.

Seriously China has economic trouble, which slows down energy demand growth. The US has run the massive inflation reduction act, which seems to be working somewhat well and Europe was hit hard by the energy crisis reducing emissions in the EU through lower consumption and faster green roll out and Russia as its fossil fuel exports fall. On top of that green technologies like solar panels, wind trubines, electric vehicles, heat pumps and so forth become cheaper all the time. It is certainly possible that we can achieve peak emissions soon.

Using solar panels to power artificial lighting so you can vertically stack farms directly inside cities doesn't make any sense from a sustainability perspective.

But greenhouses in the suburbs that are tied into the city's thermal grid and seasonal thermal energy store is the future of agriculture IMO.

By enclosing fields in greenhouses you decrease the land, water, pesticide, and fertilizer requirements, while also eliminating fertilizer runoff and the possibility of soil depletion from tilling. By tying a greenhouse into a thermal grid the greenhouse can act as a solar thermal collector in the summer while maybe even condensing the water that evaporates through the plants for reuse. Then you can use that same heat to heat homes during the winter or extend the growing season in the greenhouse even further.

https://www.renewableenergymagazine.com/storage/world-s-largest-thermal-energy-storage-to-20240409

https://www.dlsc.ca/

https://ag.umass.edu/greenhouse-floriculture/fact-sheets/heat-storage-for-greenhouses

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/152874/a-greenhouse-boom-in-china

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150070/almerias-sea-of-greenhouses

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/interactive/2022/netherlands-agriculture-technology/ (Yes I know they use artificial lighting in a lot of these, and yes I know a lot of the value of their agricultural exports comes from flowers, but the point is it's another example of large scale greenhouse use. Also they do still produce quite a bit of food in a small area, in addition to the flowers.)

Initial upfront costs are heavy but you would be saving all of the transport and logistics costs for the lifetime of the facility. Aeroponics are also a lot less resource intense than growing in the dirt.

As to solar, payback is usually 7-15 years depending on overhead costs, while most panels are still at 80% output in 20 to 25 years. Batteries don’t last as long as panels when being used to near capacity, but they’ll still do about half the lifespan of the panels. Batteries prices are also falling about as quickly as panel prices, with us now being in the neighborhood of 100 dollars per kwh of storage.

I also think it’s a bit of a misnomer, especially on this instance, to consider these things completely dead and worthless at 80% effectiveness, especially when that is still far more effective than a brand new top of the line one a decade ago. I think that there are a lot of people in the world who wouldn’t mind the system taking up 25% more space if they could get them much cheaper, it’s just that much like EV battery range, a lot of people are finding that they don’t really need to replace the thing away at 80% capacity in the first place.

For your first point, sure let’s consider that the case, then the old panels can be recycled and you get more efficient ones, not a bad trade.

Also, share with your neighbour the extra energy? Or contact your municipal office to pass a tax cut/payback? There’s so much opportunity there! (Just imagine if your city passes such an initiative and others adopt too! Less reliance on fossil fuels!)

On your second point, yeah, we need more innovation in recycling technology. Hopefully we get there too 😊