this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Solarpunk utopias are not energy-poor utopias. Quite the contrary. They are what happens once we have decorrelated CO2 emissions and energy use.
When I was a kid, my parents brought me weekly at the town's library, and about monthly at the city's bookstore. There is some margin before a computer usage comes close in terms of CO2 emissions.
Most AI companies "offset" their carbon footprint. I guess a part of that accounting is greenwashing but some are doing that directly with solar panels. I would argue that in such a case, their energy usage is irrelevant. And I trust that they probably do what they claim because it does save them a lot of money to do so.
Also "a lot of energy" is really debatable. Even if they used power directly from the US grid, the Llama 2 models (which fuel a democratization of LLMs like none before) have emitted about the same as one international flight for their training, that needs to be done only once and that is now free for everyone to use. There are not a lot of fields that have such an impact for such a low footprint. One international conference bringing people from many countries would have 10x that footprint already.
I guess you can decorrelate CO2 emissions, but in turn will have to put up with similar disadvantages caused by mining pollution, solar panel production, etc. Sometimes it seems that the proponents of an energy rich future still dream of having a free lunch and eating their cake too because 'renewables', but these technologies need resources and infrastructure as well, which an energy hungry population might not be able to provide in a sustainable way (can't burn the forest faster than it grows back, can't cover the entire surface of the earth with solar panels).
Sometimes it feels that people living in the fossil fuels world have a hard time understanding that the fossil fuel maths is not universal. A fossil fuel world requires extraction per kWh (energy) used, a post-fossil world requires extraction per kW (power) installed. Once your solar panel installed, whether they produce or not does not change the environmental impact. Actually one could argue that not producing energy is what causes waste and environmental impact. Also, panels are highly intermittent. At noon you will likely have a spike of free energy. Yep, that's a free lunch with a cake and cherry at the top.
A portion of the Sahara or of any ocean would be enough for several times the current world consumption. And if we start deploying in space (we have the tech for btw, yes including microwave transmission, tested over long enough distance) there is basically no limit before Kardashev II.
What are your solar panels built out off? They never need maintenance? We can just plaster them over the bit of remaining wildlife we have on the planet? And I find future solutions in space for very present problems too optimistic, sorry. I do not agree with your username, I think we shouldn't keep the pace, but seriously slow down. Because a lot of the tech we have doesn't really add life quality but rather reduces it, at the stage we're at. 'Shooting solar panels into space' sounds very much like another tech-heavy idea when we first need to relearn to live and coexist with the life we haven't destroyed yet. A lot of energy can be saved that we are wasting. Are we still cooling data centers with water that is used for nothing else? Why doesn't that heat get used where it's needed? Solar panels without shade-loving crops planted under them? Wasted space. Things not recycled? Unrecycleable things still produced?
Not saying that solar panels in space at some point might not be a useful idea if our tech evolves a lot - but before that we absolutely have to learn to not shit everywhere we walk, so to speak, and contain our production and energy cycle processes. But I guess this just might be a discrepancy in how far we want to look into the future here. I'm just afraid if we go too fast we miss the first step in our current affair of mess we made: cleanup, containment, co-existence.
I am not saying that space-based solar power is our go-to solution or that we need to bet on that to solve all other problems. I am saying that room to put solar panels is not the limiting factor of the tech. Cover deserts and oceans, use them as shades as you propose, and we have enough room to produce several times our consumption. I am only mentioning space only to express how limitless this factor is.
For the essential part mostly silicium, which is abundant on earth. Usually some structural metal, like aluminium or steel as well but many other materials work. You need small amounts of rare earths as impurities, many different tech exist. None has a problem of sourcing the minerals. We have enough proven reserves of these to switch to renewables. At this point the conversation usually switch to the environmental impact of resources extractions, which is not a tech problem, but a political one: we can make clean extraction. We make shitty extraction because it is legal to pay mineral from countries with no environmental protection and no labor rights but that's like saying farming can't be done sustainably because in some countries it is done by burning down forests to install ever-growing farms.
Not a lot. Cleaning in some places, though a well designed system will have the rain for that. Weeding once in a while in luxuriant places. In some places panels are put flat, not at an angle, so that a dumb automated cleaning system is easy to put into place. It is less efficient per area of solar panel, but apparently as efficient per area of ground occupied. In space no, no maintenance (though here again, not advocating that directly)
The biggest problem about Saharan solar farm is how are you going to get the power to where it needs to be?
It has been studied, partially funded, called DESERTEC, put on hold since the Arab Spring.
Basically: big DC power lines. The tech is known and exists.
I don't know if the various hydrogen production or methanation processes are advanced enough to consider these as an alternative though.