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11 sats \ 21 replies \ @mallardshead OP 12 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: Intercontinental energy grids. 🌎←♻️→🌍 bitcoin
Was in the energy industry for a while surveying. Probably was around 2015 when renewable costs starting falling so fast that a durable energy transition started taking shape. Now it's getting beyond ideology to where renewable options (especially geothermal heating/cooling) just make economic sense. And the efficient product designs are moving almost too fast to keep up with. It's not going to stop. I really can't imagine what it'll look like when solid-state batteries go commercial. I bet the average single family home will produce 150% of what they use by 2035.
150%? so ur saying this is how mining hashpower distributes and decentralizes further?
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Well that's a subject to ponder, but if energy inputs are free, then theoretically all hardware is profitable. We'll have to see where photonic silicon takes us, and in what ways hashpower gets commoditized. All the same, mining has consistently become more distributed over time.
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He is retarded. He was probably a sales rep and ate up all the fiat solar propaganda. He has zero trchnical background.
@k00b everything ks way too tiny on here. I accidentally zapped guy below and can't undo it.
If I think buttons are too small, 95% of people over the age of 50 cannot use this website at all
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You really are quite something dear Delta. It's like your brain is tethered to 2018 or prior so far as photovoltaics go. "Solar" is a very broad word, kind of like "crypto". Some folks can navigate the nuance. Others like to conflate. Where do you get your data from? Genuinely curious.
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"Where do I get my data from"
Dude, you are talking about how you have FOMO about the costs of cable manufacturing because you don't know how things are made or what drives cost of incredibly simple things.
I'm done being nice and friendly in my comments -- you are a worthless piece of shit, and you have no curiosity. You are leftist, statist scum, and you're "oh, look at me I'm so jovial why are you mean" tactics don't work outside of your leftist echo chamber. This is beyond stupid. Now you are just being a trash person making the world a vastly worse place. You are far worse than a nocoiner who makes an honest living.
There are plenty of nocoiners who are not like you. You are disgustingly arrogant. Your sort of arrogance is literally the root of every evil thing that has every happened throughout human history. Not understanding bitcoin is something I can accept in certain people for it is an emotional challenge, but there is no excuse for your behavior. I hope you lose most of your bitcoin, for it will make the rest of the world have more electricity.
You are not much less evil than 15th century style rapist, pillaging terrorists. You are not worth having a conversation with on the actual subject and you have already shown that is not something you are interested in anyway.
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My dear Delta. I'm not losing my BTC and have been consistently stacking since the last Obama Administration. I'm no leftist, rightist, or statist. Just a decentralized advocate. That means energy, money, transportation, food, and the internet. For energy, you really need to ask what that means and how it's achieved. I want you to tell me how I opt-out of the grid without renewable energy and storage, and how countries opt-out of dictatorships and inputs traded on centralized and manipulated commodities marketplaces. Fiat literally has a direct connection to fossil fuels via the petrodollar. You will eventually come around to the distributed and decentralized way of thinking about this like all bitcoiners. Bitcoin's mining economy of scale demands it. Still love you.
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@mallardshead I would like to respectfully disagree with your assessment that by 2035 PV owners will be generating 150% of their energy needs. This really is simple Physics and truthful market dynamics. I live in Uganda and full-scale rooftop solar energy is something acquired only by the rich who can afford to pay for 24/7 national electricity. The poor can only afford tiny PV systems for lighting. These do not boil water and certainly cannot cook food.
OP has written a very good and fun-to-read article on HVDC, but the way he fumbled the data on solar electricity supply economics is off-putting. Simply understand this, if solar WAS REALLY cheaper that fossil fuels, then the poorest parts of the world would be the most PV covered areas on Earth. Places like Morocco that literally enjoy desert level amounts of sunshine almost 12 hours each day, might afford to greatly subsidize solar PV farms enough to profit from that entire investment. In Uganda, with our equatorial climate, lots of water bodies and forested places, it hardly ever shines non-stop for 8 hours on the sunniest of days during the dry season. So PV farms here will always run secondary (big time secondary) to national grid hydroelectricity.
If neither you nor the OP hasn't heard of Alex Epstein I really recommend you go check him out. He has facts backed by graphs, references, and rebuttals to quoted exaggerations by all the big pro-renewable experts (including Leonardo Di Caprio's guy).
Thank you for your time.
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Now about fiat being connected to fossil fuels via the petrodollar, this is a non sequitur if one concludes that 'therefore if we do away with fossil fuels, we shall have done away with fiat'. fiat corrupts fossil fuels, not the other way around. And they do not corrupt the world together.
Fossil fuels are only a big problem as far as only one metric is concerned - they pollute the air. Otherwise, they are the densest, cheapest, most useful energy source that propelled the USA into global dominance (because most thankfully to their lucky stars who watch over ya'll, when Americans first discovered oil they could trade it as they see fit. They literally showered in it and at one point, owners of oil wells thought oil was some useless nuisance making their farmlands dirty. Not like every other part of the world now where oil trade is a secret dealing between top brass in the government and foreign contractors).
Because of fossil fuels, in fact, we can support 8 billion humans on this planet with the best modern life has to offer. And China can manufacture tons of solar panels faster than a kid sucks breastmilk from its mother's tits.
Bitcoiners will therefore go where energy is the cheapest and if Texas has state subsidies making solar the cheapest, then by all means, be my guest. But don't go badmouthing people in Africa say running Bitcoin nodes with cow dung biogas, tree wood, diesel, or plastics. Because this ain't Texas.
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Not sure it was a non-sequitur, because the conclusion to be drawn isn't that taking away the petrodollar causes a cessation of fiat to exist. This wasn't the case before the petrodollar existed. My argument is that there's a connection, one that's built the American security order, and provided demand. Because oil was the fastest expanding type of energy once upon a time, and companies like Ford, Chevy, Exxon, Chevron, etc, were the largest companies in the world by market cap (internet didn't exist yet), any expansion of energy was necessarily an expansion of the USD. All oil profits found their way into the US stock market and in US bonds. It was so effective that for 52 years we saw few to no negative effects for monetary expansion of the USD. It was far better than the quasi gold standard that was dumped in its favor. As the petrodollar fades, demand becomes more of an issue. This is partly a bullish feeling I have about bitcoin. Green energy is the fastest expanding type of energy now, and per KwH is the cheapest. Bitcoin uses electricity.
Fossil fuels are cheap and dense, the wind, sun and earth's core are also energy dense. Fossil fuels have done quite a bit for humanity's flourishing, but that's simply a historical observation.
Bitcoin miners will go where the energy is cheapest agreed. My point was the ERCOT grid miners haven't faced competition from energy storage or HVDC yet. Both occupy the same unique space as miners do. They'll lobby against it as it threatens to change their energy contract favorabillity, instead of changing their business models. Mining will get distributed globally, and hashpower will grow enough to where there's nothing about that grid that's advantageous beyond its independence from federal oversight. So nothing there changes, which means nothing about the companies change. None are profitable, none are good stewards of debt, none have grown their treasuries, none of them have shown in any way that they will without more fiat debt. Thusly, I view an investment there as a waste.
Thanks Ken, I was talking mostly about the US and single family homes. Apartments/condos excluded. I have a solar and battery setup that's 2 years old and produce about 130%. When my geothermal for cooling/heating is complete it will be closer to 250%. The cost of both is falling. The technological efficiency of both are increasing. Finding newly built single family homes without one or the other will become rare in about 7 years, not just because of state incentives, but because of economics and demand. You mentioned hydroelectricity, that's also renewable. Quebec has an overabundance of hydro and is running it to New York City via HVDC. Ethiopia will produce 80% of their country's electricity with the GERD dam and so on.
Cellphones, VCRs, electric cars, video games, etc, were once things only for rich people and non-existent in the developing world. Same with renewable energy infrastructure. That started to change around 2015 though. The developing world accounts for around 54% of (non-hydro) renewable energy investment now. Don't focus solely on solar, also consider wind and geothermal and nuclear. Just like we see a mix of fossil fuels providing energy as geographical circumstances demand today, assume there will be a mix of renewable energy technologies tomorrow.
I've read Alex Epstein's recent book Fossil Future, and met him once when he was walking his well-groomed dog. He's discounted fossil fuel geopolitical friction, grid interconnectors, and the capacity of human ingenuity a bit, but it was a good read.
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Sorry I've taken a while to respond to this.
You have given points to the effect of "renewable are not being allowed to compete with fossils" and to the extent that this is true, that shows the corrupting effect of fiat. And the unnecessary politicization of energy supply and demand economics.
Only thing governments had to do in 2009, or 2010, even 2023, is mine and learn about BTC like their citizens. And ask for it in taxes. And all would be well with the world.
It will happen eventually. Thank goodness for the fact that BTC is an idea whose time has come.
It might be true that renewable are becoming cheaper in many parts of the world for household needs. But most households, industry and social services can't get past the infrastructure costs like mega battery packs and decentralized grids for energy synchronization.
Now, allow me share on how I think it will happen.
Some research has show that BTC can help supercharge the energy transition --> https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/bitcoin-mining-solar-wind-renewable-energy-b2454666.html
My own back of the napkin calculations involving the power consumption of the hash rate, the mining rewards and the value growth of the currency (which tracks everything like transactions within it) confirms it.
The facts are startling.
People are willing to pay or invest about 6x more money in their electiricty bill if it is running Bitcoin or some Bitcoin related productivity, than if it was running Netflix, Cable TV, Refrigerators in a Supermarket, Video games, etc. Name it.
Because that is what the growth in value means. People are pumping funds into Bitcoin.
This is wild and means the best way to really transition is to build as many BTC projects around the world, run them on renewables and
wherever possible, and subsidize the whole thing with fossils as renewable tech matures.
Again, it will happen. Because it is an idea whose time has come.
Sam Altman wants $7 trillion to build AI systems but Bitcoin-for-renewables is serious competition he isn't thinking about.
Again, people are willing to pay for electiricty mining/transacting BTC than for electricty generating impressive ChatGPT prompts.
I'm hoping to systemize all this in an article on Hackernoon.com. Stay tuned.
Why respectfully? Idiots are harmful and should be mocked. He is reading propaganda on fake price info with false LCOE numbers while ignoring EROI, which shows how garbage renewables are.
He is just a brainwashed leftist.
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"decentralize everything"
= LARPer maxi 🤡🤡🤡
You can go and live in the Alaskan wilderness today and even the IRS will not bother you.
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🤣
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