A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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Fun Fact: Since 2006-2007 Uruguay’s power infrastructure has mostly relied on green energy, making up over 90% of their power infrastructure, also making them fully self sustaining power wise
In Canada (2023), renewables make up 66% and nuclear 13% (about 80% together). That's also pretty good.
yeah some countries have that, like sweden and austria. the reason is because they're very mountaineous areas, so there's a lot of water power to harvest. in germany, which is really flat, that would have been impossible with water alone.
fully self sustaining power wise
Damn, imagine that.
Talk about national security.
I had to laugh at this one lol
It is pretty funny that as advanced as our technology gets, we're still basically just at the higher end of the "steam engine" phase.
I explained this to my oldest when he learned about the steam engine and how cool it was. When I told him it was the peak in power he was like "but we have nuclear and gas" and I told him that nuclear power is basically just a super charged steam engine, and nuclear rods boil water better than coal or gasoline, but it's basically a steam engine. I went over how gasoline in cars was basically the same, but instead of steam, it used tiny explosions. We watched a few how it's made type videos.
We're honestly almost past that at this point. Solar is devouring the world. Total global electricity production capacity is about 10 TW. China is currently producing 1 TW of panels annually. And the panels are still getting better and the prices are still dropping. We will quickly reach the point where the vast majority of global electricity production is solar, and everything else is a rounding error.
There just isn't going to be any reason to build fusion plants. Maybe in the distant future colonies in the outer solar system and beyond will use them. But for anything inward of Mars, solar is the way to go. Solar+batteries is already, in 2026, the cheapest form of baseload power available. Material limitations are not a problem with modern battery chemistries. Daily swings in power demand will be solved by batteries. And we simply won't have to worry about seasonal power swings. We'll build enough solar panels to meet all our winter needs. We'll build enough to power our cities during the coldest, cloudiest months. And then the rest of they year we'll have super-abundant dirt cheap power.
The future is one of vast energy abundance. We're going to find all sorts of ways to use energy that we've never even dreamed of before - mostly to take advantage of the abundance of dirt cheap energy we'll have during all but the coldest months.
The days the steam engine are numbered. With the exception of remote polar outposts, everything's going solar. It's simply the cheapest most abundant form of energy we've ever discovered. Nothing can match it.
Yeah about that.
Those are termosolar powerplant, they use the sun to boil water and spin a turbine.
Its even more metal they heat salt that heats water to spin the turbine. This keeps the power generation well after sun down.
That's what they want you to think. I bet it also powers a secret orbital space laser. I should know, a man with a theoretical degree in physics told me.
That technology is a relic of the past. Solar panels are cheap and efficient now. Just use solar panels.
And much easier to operate and troubleshoot.
I watched a docu about one fusion startup in the US. They're skipping the boiling water step and converting the energy directly to electricity.
I dont remember the mechanics of how though. But they reportedly are the closest to net positive.
Can we then use that electricity to power a boiler?
Now we just need solar boilers.
To boil water.
Driving by the one in California was always a trip. You could see the lines of sunlight being reflected from the mirrors in the air; it was so bright.