They literally had record profits the last few years, rather than being forced to lay down solar. I think power should be a global endeavor, not some local for profit business with complete regulatory capture that makes competition illegal.
Yes I'm angry, because I pay more in electric than most anywhere in the world. If I charge my care with LEVEL 2 using city provided charges, during the day, it's more expensive than gas.
Cheap electricity means you can do things that made "no sense" with expensive electricity. (e.g. smelt aluminum)
Cheap electricity means you can underbid regions that have expensive electricity...
As Technology Connections said, "Panels that cover your electrical needs for the next 25+ years? In the Midwest, we call that a good deal!"
Humankind generates 20 TW today. That’s a massive jump.
And everyone wants more power. It determines what society can do.
But 20 TW is a pittance in the grand scheme of the vast universe. Imagine if we were generating 100 TW or 1,000 TW.
That’s why we talk about stuff like the Kardashev Scale — type 1, 2, 3 civilization type stuff.
Electricity is not currently cheap. 20 TW is a pittance. One day humanity will reach a point where we’re generating 500 TW of power and questions of being able to smelt aluminum or make drinking water from brine seem almost like a joke. We will have flying construction drones 24/7 at that scale of energy production. At that point, we’ll be asking questions like “when will we have enough energy to terraform a planet?”
Of course, there are side effects of greater power generation such as global warming… but once again, it’s a scale thing. The universe is vast.
Slowly, we are getting there.
> Batteries are now cheap enough to unleash solar’s full potential, getting as close as 97% of the way to delivering constant electricity supply 24 hours across 365 days cost-effectively in the sunniest places.
What does this mean? It means we are most of the way there with solar and batteries alone, even if we need a bit of carbon based generation to bridge the gap while solar and battery deployments scale globally. Solar and batteries will only continue to get less expensive and better.
Our World In Data: Installed solar energy capacity - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/installed-solar-pv-capaci...
Solar PV go brrr.
I don't know what you can take of this, maybe you can see it as advance pedaling, or to get a feel for energy conversion losses. Anyways, it is the kind of harmlessly stupid idea that I would want to try just because I could.
https://velo.outsideonline.com/road/road-racing/tour-de-fran...
https://hackaday.io/project/191731-practical-power-cycling
and is also a few years out of date.
I did do a video back then going against the infamous "bicycle toaster challenge" video (in which I determined it was probably less real than they made it out to be). I'm nowhere as fit as those guys, so in my attempt I was only able to turn a bagel into a dry crouton over the course of an hour.
I've seen numbers like 250W mechanical power for an average trained cyclist, so either my setup is rather inefficient, my measurements are off, or I'm going to find out that I'm nowhere near as strong as a real cyclist.
On the other hand, the stationary bike I got originally had a rubber belt, which it would chew excessively and I eventually swapped it for a chain because it kept slipping in spite of tensioning it more, suggesting I'm hitting the thing harder than it was originally designed for (how that translates into power I'm not sure).
Thanks for sharing the details.