Posted by baud147258 4/4/2025
* Kerosene saves the whales
* Plastics saves the elephants
* Coal saved the forests
Other similar stories?
The trick is leveraging insanely cheap solar electricity to do everything else.
If you're thinking of Germany during WWII, or South Africa during apartheid, they produced synthetic liquid fuels from coal. That was technology that worked, though it was very expensive. And of course CO2 emissions were much higher than using petroleum.
The only really feasible way to produce that much electricity renewably by this point in time or even within the next 20+ years has been nuclear energy, which the world largely turned their backs on the last few decades and left us in an even bigger hole to fill.
I can see a day where solar powered refineries exist. Either under their own power or by being grid-tied.
But there will come a time when it’s just too expensive to pull it up from many places and we end up with dozens of wells and optimize cracking for petrochemicals other than fuel.
We might no burn every drop of oil. But we’re going to use it until it’s gone.
“Oh maybe we won’t need the most dense and easily convertible source of hydrocarbons on our planet!”
The durations, scale, and reaction times to changing conditions are different (sometimes worse, sometimes better) but the concept is the same.
We solved those problems before, and have already solved them with solar it's just a matter of building out the infrastructure.
We may have to shed a single digit percentage of "market efficiency" in the short term to ensure the future of humanity, though, so there is resistance.
Makes me wonder if you can smooth out certain peaks by introducing individualised random delays in the television programming ;)
Also, Octopus Energy is now the UKs largest provider, they have tariffs with variable rates (demand-based pricing). Very occasionally you can be paid to use electricity. That's certainly encourages some users away from boiling the kettle at peak times.
/Tesla
Non-chemical batteries, flywheels and hydroelectric storage green hydrogen and such other ways of storing energy as we can come up with are certainly part of the solution.