[ExI] How slow is capitalism?

[Samantha Atkins]

On 04/27/2011 02:17 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
> 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.

Not to mention we have nowhere near the capability to do many varieties 
of it yet for any sum.  Even if you nailed the huge launch costs you 
need an army of space walking astronauts in a much more hazardous than 
LEO environment or vastly better space robots (and an army of those) 
than we have today.

> 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.

Sure.  There are ways to make almost competitive syngas and methanol 
today from basically yard waste or from algae farms.  California figured 
out the necessary mods and ran a fleet of flex fuel cars that can run on 
any mxture of syngas, methanol, ethanol, gasoline you throw at them in 
the early 90s.

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

If you can get the adequate supply and distribution and if you wait 
about a decade for it to be possible that all gas using engines pretty 
much get replaced.

>> 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.

And don't get rid of any of them at a cost higher than what we now pay 
for power from those sources.

> 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.

So how much of the IPV6 deployment can those of us that are not ISPs 
do?  How much do we have to wait on ISPs for?  If you have links 
answering these questions they would be much appreciated.

- samantha