efficiency is begging for full on class conflict. they are burning the puppet show that kept them in comfortably in power

the only thing worse than an accelerationist is one who does it on accident, i feel like im watching a trainwreck in slow motion

call me a cynic but the government exists in large part to insulate the ruling class from the rest of em. the bulky and inefficient bits allow us to maintain some illusion of an egalitarian democracy and still slouch towards a slightly better future. getting rid of that illusion in the name of

"surely you're not advocating fo-"
again, no, but it's not hard to imagine that a lot of people are looking at this thinking they have no other choice, the gov just colluded w the courts to screw them over

helpful voice in the back: "a class action lawsuit!"
thats what Mass vs EPA was, and everyone just watched an industry insider buy his way into a position of power that afforded him the ability to overturn it

and since free market incentives don't exist to reign in CO2 emissions due to the diluted, global nature of their impacts, the public might feel left to enforce the costs back onto producers themselves... gee I wonder what that looks like

"but what about weather dependency? and nighttime??"

batteries are pretty cool tech here and seem to be improving in density and dropping cost too... rmi.org/the-rise-of-...

again not discussed in the BHL report

Chris however wrote the BHL report in 2024 and winds up making representative claims about solar using data so far out of date that it ignores a major industry inflection point

which doesn't feel like good faith argument imo, but who am I to say

(side note you should read all of Handmer's work on batteries and grid storage: caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/07/12/g... )

in Smil's defense, he published his paper on energy densities right when solar manufacturing broke into dedicated silicone manufacturing for PV cells, which nearly doubled learning rates in the field. tough time to make predictions

from Casey Handmer: caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/11/09/s...

which seems a little odd in light of the fact that there are plants running close to 43 W/m2 in Mexico right now
www.power-technology.com/data-insight...

if we were to ask Smil in 2010 what todays densities would look like, he'd suggest ~15 W/m2 (a small improvement) and call even this unlikely (see quote from paper). Chris' use of this data in his 2024 book would suggest he agrees with that claim even today?

back then Smil came up w an average solar density of 10 W/m2, which
a) is a global average rather than regional and
b) doesn't really line up the 1.21 homes / acre cited in the BHL figure using 2024 EIA home energy estimates of 10.8 kWh / year (someone check my math?)

but whatever...

Fig 1.3 and 1.4 cite data from 2015 and 2022, and Fig 1.2 doesn't have a date. The Vaclav Smil paper it cites is available online tho, published in... 2010. Old data isnt exactly a crime, buuut this is "Energy Systems of *Today*" vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/u...

The section titled "Energy Systems Today" harps on renewable intermittency leading to higher energy prices, and bemoans the need for significant land use due to low energy density. a few figures are cited

report is available here btw: libertyenergy.com/resource-lib...

(it was v good and you should read it (if you want to))

i respect you sticking to your luddite guns. something noble in the conviction even if its wrong :)

anyways finally this all comes full circle to me thinking ai demand for power is only going up, and if you care about emissions not also going up your level of urgency should be increasing proportionately

so uh. sko nuclear and solar panels

all of this could be null if adoption (and subsequent inference costs) get outpaced by power plant construction and interconnection, but i think thats unlikely