But what happens after that up front cost?? With the current price of a barrel of sun, can we really afford to limit fossil fuels?
this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2026
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I bought a 1 kg rest mass barrel of sunshine, and... boy howdy, for the price I might as well have purchased 1.8 times 10^15 joules from the energy grid.
1kg rest mass of sunlight in a barrel is objectively horrifying lol. Napkin math says thats ~9e19J. For reference, Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever detonated on earth, produced ~2.1e17J. You've got a barrel containing ~440 Tsar bomba detonations
I'm glad it doesn't exist. That committee trying to design warning signs for permanent nuclear waste storage would have a field day. "The inner lining is only 99.99999999999999999999999999% reflective while it's in this certain temperature range. Do not inhale or exhale forcefully in the vicinity." is a non-starter.
You don't measure sun in barrels. It comes in bars.
So do I.
How many?
All of them.
That creates a logistical problem.
Yeah but you have to pay for the sunshine every year that you use to power the panels. And you have to build pipelines to transport that sunshine from the faraway places where it's developed, and sometimes you have to liquefy it a load it onto gigantic tanker ships and carry it overseas, and there's always a risk of it exploding and...oh, wait. I'm thinking of the gas. Never mind.
Think of all the sunshine jobs.
To be fair, NG was sunshine at one point.
Yes, but have you considered that using renewables means you're gay? Checkmate liberals.
The propagandized will continue parroting their fossil fuel talking points and will continue to vote for the politicians that collect fossil fuel money.
Why do you say it like it's an eternal inevitability? Propagandists spend so much time and money on propaganda because it has to be maintained at a certain pressure to effectively change someone's behavior. The solution to the propaganda problem, then, is to combat propaganda, not wring our hands in despair. We've been busting up propaganda rings since the dawn of the written word, it can be done. Just needs people to do it.
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They already moved on to different tactics like restricting the ability to connect solar to the grid or simply burying all applications in red tape for years.
Idk, it's working pretty great for me.
My experience: https://lemmy.world/post/32326227
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they are going pretty hard in maintaining gas and oil production
Probably true in every market that is not the US, with extreme tariffs and EOs banning solar technology.
This is true when comparing to peaker gas/coal plants which are less efficient than more expensive Combine Cycle plants, though both can still run 24/7. The myth of baseload as a requirement ignores that "outside of heating or extreme summer night heat" night demand is half of day/evening demand.
Batteries are now extremely cheap as well, and certainly the combo compared to Combined Cycle is cheaper for better baseload coverage because combined cycle/baseload must overprovide daily needs by meeting peak demand, while solar+batteries can better cover full day needs.
The absolute clincher though is price certainty for 30 years. Free from extortion or geopolitical oppression/chaos of fuel supply chains. Global warming has direct costs to property values, insurance costs, and food scarcity. US policy has moved to create global fuel scarcity for increased dependence on US, as well.
That's always dangerous to say, because it misses a bunch of the equation.
You can run your lights during the day and your heat when there's lots of sun.
Green washed technology would cause ecological Armageddon if adopted at proper scale because the energy needs to go somewhere for when you need it, and that scale of energy storage isn't cheap or clean.
California at the point where utility-scale batteries can power the state overnight a few days a year. If we are actually able to build offshore wind, and proceed with the planned battery build-out, it's going to be most of the year. And the ecological armageddon isn't happening.
I'm going to say two things that can be extrapolated wrong:
- I can run an LLM on a 10 Watt thin client system.
- A modern laptop can run under some circumstances all night on batteries.
So the first thing is a very specific claim I could not then extrapolated to say that llms do not burn electricity because they clearly burn and gigawatts of electricity.
The second one is a very specific claim that a certain device can run for a certain period of time it does not mean that I can run my house off of a laptop battery overnight.
This is where scale really matters because specific claims end up being replaced with broad claims intentionally by authors who are hunting for clicks and are really hoping to get the eyeballs of people who are interested in green energy. They will phrase the fact that certain battery Banks were able to run all night to misleadingly lead people to believe that those battery Banks were running the entire State all night when in fact they were just a small portion of the electricity being generated. That matters a lot. Running a frontier model of an LLM versus running a little 1b parameter model are not the same thing. Being able to run specific batteries over the course of a specific night in a state which is world famous for being temperate, that is different than rolling out a certain renewable energy Nationwide to 300 million people who don't live in places that are famously temperate.
These stories are intended to make environmentalism a consumer problem, in the sense that you just aren't consuming enough product and if you consumed the correct product and paid enough money for the environmentalism boxes, then we could solve the problem.
That's applying a very industrial revolution mindset to a problem caused by the excesses of the industrial revolution.
The ecological Armageddon is when you scale up. Scale to the United States, and try to build 3 days of storage so we can fully migrate to green energy, and you'd require more lithium ion batteries than have been manufactured by mankind, or if you use lead acid batteries you'd require more lead than we have known reserves of lead on Earth. Recycling appears at first like it's a solution, but lithium ion batteries are barely economically recyclable as it is at the moment, and lead acid batteries would require massive transportation networks to be continually moving around massive amounts of lead.
You can say "We don't need 3 days of storage", but even if you cut it by 3/4, you're still talking about one of the largest endeavors in human history, and you haven't even built the solar and wind farms yet.
The real solution is to reduce our need for energy by dramatically changing the way we look at how we use energy. Everything from cars to homes is built around a post-war energy economy that isn't sustainable. We can't just drop the exact same things in "but green". You can't consume your way out of this, but a lot of these articles would have you believe just that.
Get ready for "Economic rationalists" having a meltdown in 5.. 4.. 3...
We could use the excess power to bank carbon, then if we need more power we can burn that same carbon.
Edit: This isn't to be efficient, it's to remove carbon from the atmosphere and reverse global warming. I meant that being able to use it as emergency fuel would just be a perk.
Seems super complicated when you could just pump water up a hill, then open a dam when we need more power.
My bad, the carbon banking would be to clean the atmosphere, being able to burn it is just a side effect.
Have you tried boiling water?
Jokes aside:
Instead of boiling that water to run a turbine perhaps we could use a Thermal Electric Generator to extract energy without said turbine and everything that comes with it.
Dont know how well this would scale or what it's hard use limits would be. But I hear a common solution to "too much solar" is to run the excess energy into heating a pool.
A Thermo Electric Generator could allow people to recapture that energy in their pool.
Heat pumps work like this. They pump heat into the ground during hot months, then take some of it back during cold months.
Hear pumps do this, but they pump energy into the ground during hot months to cool the house, then during cold months they pull some of it back.
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