this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Solarpunk technology
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Technology for a Solar-Punk future.
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Solarpunk is not about switching to a scrappy medieval lifestyle, it is about building a sustainable comfortable future.
Why do so many people always assume that energy uses are necessarily unsustainable or scarce? It is the first part of "SOLARpunk". You can have renewable and abundant energy.
It's not an assumption, it's a calculation. There's no way you can use the same amount of energy with solar and wind as you can with fossil fuels and nuclear. Cutting use is the thing. Anyone who's looked at the numbers of the energy budget is forced to conclude this.
Show me the calculation then. To me it is clear that we are heading towards 100% renewables now that batteries have reached prices that makes intermittence a solvable problem.
To me the switch to renewable, on the contrary, will remove many scarcity constraints from energy production. We will have peak production times where energy will have a negative cost. This will radically change the way we think about energy consumption.
Renewables keep reaching "impossible" milestones. Recently in many places, including places in the US, renewables surpass coal so to create an "impossible" milestone you need to separate wind and solar from other renewables and lump together fossils and nuclear (which is not a problematic source for the climate)
I mean, can you imagine telling people 15 years ago that even Texas, despite its toxic mentality of coupling fossil fuels and masculinity would produce more wind energy than coal energy by 2024? The trend is clear, the impossible thresholds are met one after the other and without electricity production dropping.
There's a difference between "renewable and abundant" and "infinite".
It would take the resources of five Earths for everyone on the planet to live like an American. More solar panels aren't going to change that.
What will bring sustainability is Americans, and other people living wealthy Western lifestyles, learning to live comfortably with fewer resources. You can be comfortable without eating beef for dinner every night. You can be comfortable living in a resource-efficient apartment instead of a sprawling subdivision. You can be comfortable taking public transit instead of owning a car, or teleworking instead of commuting daily, or having a low flow shower in your home instead of a tub.
Home ownership, car ownership, a meat heavy diet, fast fashion, disposable technology, plastic everything, are entitlements that you receive as a benefit of living in the imperial core. These are not necessities of life. You just think they are because patriotic and corporate propaganda has convinced you of it to make you a collaborator in its colonial extraction of the world's resources.
A sustainable comfortable future doesn't just mean improving the standard of living of the poorest in the world. It means the world's wealthiest need to check their entitlement and learn the difference between comfort and luxury.
The amount of energy required to heat bath water is not infinite.
Well yes it will. That's the whole point. To get out of fossil fuels. You get out of it by replacing things that require fossil fuels by renewable ones. You don't get out of it by merely using less of it.
That's the mentality I dont get.
Right but even renewable and abundant energy is scarce, in that it's not infinite and mismanagement or inefficient use can mean it's not there when you need it.
Communal kitchens, bathrooms and toilets mean that all the energy, materials and manpower saved from deduplicated construction and maintenance can go somewhere else.
Renewable and abundant is what we are going full speed towards. No need to mention infinity but we will clearly end up with more renewable energy production than fossil energy we are using now. Renewables are going to actually end scarcity of energy.
It doesn't make sense to shift all consumption to renewables if there's no thought for efficient consumption or reducing consumption. There's a finite amount of renewable energy that can be extracted, if consumption itself isn't managed we can be right back in the same boat of unmet needs in another century.
What do you think gets exhausted when we generate solar energy?
The very point of renewables is to not consume resources to generate energy, but merely when installing capacities.
And our current problem is not of unmet needs, it is of climate damage done by fossil fuels. Climate-wise, the planet would be better off if humans used 10x more energy in a sustainable way rather than using half as much without changing their energy mix.
Not when solar is generated. Creating and maintaining infrastructure, and using space for infrastructure.
Maybe your current problem isn't unmet needs, but there are plenty of people who do have that problem.
So, what do you think gets exhausted when we are doing this?
Time, materials, and physical space? Ideally all of the last two is reusable/ renewable after the end of lifespan on the piece of infrastructure, but in current supply chain it is not.
I guess by "time" you mean "labor". This is the first time I see this mentioned as a non-renewable resource.
How is "space" not renewable/reusable? You can destroy solar panels and put something else on its place.
All the materials used are abundant and in enough availability to multiply several times our current capacities, and as you point out, may even become reusable/recyclable at one point if it ever become economically profitable to do so. Or even before if we so desire.
Ikr
Yes time in the context of labour and also time in terms of meeting targets to replace non-renewables.
Space may not be completely renewable, some is lost or the energy to remediate the space for use could be higher than the energy/utility we could gain from it.
In the context of meeting the targets, I see little way to invest time in a more efficient way than switching to renewables. Changing mentality takes a magnitude more time and effort. I still think it is a worthwhile endeavor, but if we wait for that transition we will have destroyed most of the earth by then.
??? Square meters are square meters.
In what scenario do you see the energy to recover a solar power plant's space being higher than the energy gained from it?
The scenario is the local population's space requirements constrict the space that renewables can be built in, dense highrise world cast shadows across a solar field, and/or strip mining can create a space that would be awful for certain things.
It's not like we just do one thing different, some people build out renewables and other people can build out housing and infrastructure in better ways. Do everything you can when you can as soon as you can.
By current trends the world population will stabilise or begin shrinking in the next century or so