[ExI] How slow is capitalism?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Apr 27, 2011 at 12:38:02AM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:

> Ground based solar and wind will not supplant oil.  SBSP, StratoSolar

What do you do if after you produce 100% of peak demand from solar?
Why, you produce 200%. And then 300%. So what do you do with
that surplus? Use it, or lose it.

> or something out of left field might.

I find it curious that you continuously dismiss terrestrial solar
which favoring pie-in-the-sky solar, which is exactly like ground
solar, but more centralized, more difficult, more expensive, and
has a worse EROEI.

I absolutely can see how we can start producing SPS in 50 years,
when we start starving the ecosystem of sunlight, but that time is
not now.
 
> Once you get primary energy under control, consider what it will cost
> for synthetic oil plants (or other ways to make energy portable).  The

I think the classical city-scale Fischer-Tropsch won't happen.
We don't have the money, the time, the resource base.

What I hope will happen is scalable, modular synfuel from hydrogen
to methane, methanol, and other synfuels, under relatively mild
conditions.

And we should see electrification substituting a lot what today
takes dead dinos. 

> US uses about 20 M bbls per day.  A billion dollar plant makes about
> 40,000 bbls per day.  We will need 500 of them at a billion each.
> They will draw around 2 TW at at least $1200 B per TW.

Don't forget coal. Getting rid of coal, and oil, and after that,
gas.

But we're so good at planning. Anyone still remember that IPv4
ran out start of this year, and the first regional registry hit
exhaustion a short while ago? And deploying IPv6 is *easy* in
comparision to infrastructure work around fossil.
 
> If it is done (and I doubt it) this will result in real returns on
> real investments.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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