[ExI] The Futurism of Elon Musk

[spike at rainier66.com]

>…I found this quote by Musk to be eye-opening, "we want to be a leader in apocalypse technology." 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OtKEetGy2Y  <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OtKEetGy2Y> 


 

On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
Subject: Re: [ExI] The Futurism of Elon Musk

 

>…Hear, hear.  A lord of industry Musk may be, but he is delivering a better future for the masses than nearly all the other lords… Adrian

 

 

Thanks John and Adrian!  John good to see you back, me lad.

 

I will tell ya about Elon Musk from a neighbor’s eye view.  I never met the man, but I met the results of his work.  We like what we see.  He started this car factory up the street, churning out coal burners as fast as he can throw em out there, people around here bought em like they were BMWs.  My neighbor bought two.  They charge at night, when the power demand is lower.  This increases baseline power load, which sounds like a bad thing but is actually a good thing: it keeps your steady powerplants going at maximum efficiency by reducing the need to slow them down.

 

Having a lot of coal-burners in the grid has a surprising additional benefit.  Read on please, my Green friends.

 

California has been wanting to get into the green energy and renewable game as much as we can, lotsa political sympathy for that notion, willingness to pay more for power to get it.  I support that too: coal is dirty.  Solar is clean.  I will pay more to have that.

 

OK so we understand: solar power takes a lotta room, and there isn’t enough of that near a city, so the solar and wind farms need to be out there a ways and long powerlines are needed to carry the power to the money, we get that.  Sometimes… those powerlines cause fires and burn up the houses of people we care about, we get that too, but the power company does its best.  One of the most effective ways to reduce the fire risk is to limit the peak load on the powerlines, particularly the ones which go thru the redwood forests (ja the same ones in the song.)

 

At the end of the day (in the literal sense) the power from those mod hip solar farms drops just as ma and pa are getting home with their coal burners and plugging those rigs into the chargers.  On hot days the air conditioners are still running.  Power supplied by the solar farms drop, lines from the coal plants and natural gas plants and nuke plants must make up the load, the peak on those is limited because of fire risk.  Result: right around sunset… there isn’t enough power.

 

Yesterday evening we had our third blackout in two weeks.

 

All is not lost.  Some is not even really lost, it’s around here somewhere.  Just saw some a while ago.  Mr. Musk sold us the coal burners, and Mr. Musk also has a solution to the dusk power shortage problem for sale.  Stand by, for this post is already too long.

 

spike

 

 

 

 

 

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