Our 100% Clean Energy Vision - The Solutions Project
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There is an incredible amount of dreamy dialog that fails to address the issue of scale or a practical implementation. I understand that they are somewhat intentionally misleading us to try to steer the conversation for good. But sappy optimism will prove just as dangerous as denialism as it will lead to complacency and ineffective decisions on infrastructure that requires decades to construct. And our fossil energy endowment that is required to build big things will soon start to slip away.
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The USA is using over 3 TerraWatts average. The world is over 17 TW. How much lower could this be using the pen of government mandates before martial law is required? What happens when the contraction of energy consumption obsoletes the debt based economy? Absolving world debt with the stroke of a pen also absolves all personal wealth that exists in currency or digits as one monetary marker is called in and replaced by a newer one.
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For modern countries to even cut energy to 1/2 of what is currently being used would require everything to change. All built out ICE machines. Living space. Food. Working. "Jobs". Income distribution. Government.
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1.5 TW is still huge. If you add it up as MacKay said, to power a country on rebuildables requires that they are country sized. Where do we get all of this stuff?
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One million 2MW on shore wind turbines make .6 TW. How many days to build and install each turbine?
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Four thousand 500 MW Topaz sized solar farms if located in the desert make .5 TW. How many years or months to build each farm? Double the number of panels and count on many days of zero output in the winter for any that are located in the North East USA or Europe where it snows.
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You have heard of the BigF'nBattery in Australia. It takes three hundred thousand of these to store just twenty hours of a 1.5 TW rate. Just for the USA. This is the entire annual output of the GigaFactory for eight hundred years to make this many batteries.
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I agree.
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These dreamy writers of renewable plans need to find an engineering major (or High School student) to do the math.