Quote:
Originally Posted by zamler
It's not possible now, in 10 years fully expect the cost of solar to plummet and storage to be much, much better and cheaper. This is based on the last 10 years of progress, even if it slows 50% it is still viable IMO.
Do you have some other solution you see as viable? Seems like in general you pick apart any promising green energy tech. Which is fine I welcome scrutiny but at some point we have to stop talking about climate change and honestly make an attempt to fix our carbon output.
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Much much cheaper still doesn't get us remotely close. Just a very quick calculation, according to this:
https://www.theenergyfix.com/solar-farms/
by my math we'd need 100kmē of solar panels for Alberta to match demand. At $500,000 per acre, that's 122 Billion USD. And that's not including increasing production for EV's and electrical heating. Nor does it include the excess generation you need to charge batteries(you only get peak output for a few hours a day), nor does it include battery costs, which are about a billion dollars per hour of storage(for all Alberta). Imagine trying to charge and store battery power in winter with solar, and these numbers go way up. So you are quickly reaching impossible numbers.
Nuclear is the most obvious one, which is expensive, but at least it's in the sphere of reality. I don't have any other solutions because there aren't any. Short of a massive reduction global population, no answers come close. Which is why I posted what I did earlier. We'll get through this with technological advances, but it's a long way down the road. I'm sorry that the reality is that it's a very difficult problem, and we don't have any magic bullets, let alone band aids right now.
We should absolutely keep working on progress, but saying that if we just built solar to power Alberta is not realistic.