I’m questioning the amount (which is what the whole argument about this being impractical is based on).
Do you really need to have a store of 11% of the city’s entire yearly energy usage? Like, 5 (almost 6!) entire weeks of energy? That seems ludicrously high to me.
The last sentence is the entire problem. It ignores the externalities of whatever it is you’re doing. Which in turn (amongst other things) makes the claim of efficient distribution questionable.
Huge energy consumption would be much less of an issue if it wasn’t also causing huge long term problems.
Like the other posters in the thread have concluded. I don't see how you could be correct at all. Everything you've described in terms of energy inefficiency is something that describes suburbia. Cities have large energy requirements but that's due to the number of people there, they don't have high energy requirements per capita.
If you can show some math that shows how having a few thousand people in walking distance of a few restaurants has a higher energy requirement than spreading those same few thousand people around the country and having them stay fed _without them farming their own food_ then you might start to have an argument here but for now this seems in the realm of impossibility
Sounds totally reasonable to me. I don’t understand the theory of trying to strangle household energy usage.
Increasing household energy use is not the problem, it’s actually the solution to a huge productivity and standard of living increase for your population.
Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy. Limiting energy use disproportionately hurts the poorest of the population and drives up the poverty rate.
That 18.85kWh of energy at utility scale is roughly $0.25 USD in energy cost. You figure you got a quarter’s worth of value from everything that energy accomplished for you that day? Probably more like 100x that value.
What’s the opportunity cost of trying to halve your energy bill and save about a dime a day?
The solution is cheap, abundant, clean energy. The featured article shows that’s actually where most of our new production is coming from already. Although in truth that’s more indicative of how overly constrained our energy production growth is, but things are rapidly moving in the right direction due to technology maturation and a supportive tax structure.
Funny that’s all it takes to align incentives and let human ingenuity and the manufacturing learning curve run its course. The problem is the doomsdayers who can only extrapolate linear outcomes from past performance and entirely discount the obvious technological paradigm shifts which are occurring.
It sounds like a lot because you are adding up energy used by many, many people all around the world. Lots of things "sound like a lot" when you do that.
Why not do the same calculation for a few other things that people enjoy (gaming, porn, cat pics, posting to facebook/twitter, bars/drinking, holiday decorations, lawncare, etc)?
All those activities are totally unnecessary wastes of energy.
Your energy calculations seem implausible, irrelevant, and perhaps even sinister sinister. (similar to the conservative talking point about how busses, per passenger, are less efficient than cares because busses don't operate on average at capacity).
>The energy usage: We're committed to driving down energy consumption as much as possible. We only use renewable energy, energy-from-waste, or other waste heat to power our plants.
They make it impossible to do the math. Energy consumption, lifetime capital cost per ton, are what make or break this scheme.
What am I getting at? We need to shrink our energy usage. Efficiency gains are linear, energy use grows exponentially.
So what do we do? Try old-fashioned solutions like a healthy dose of localism and urban/geographical planning so that we exponentially decrease our energy requirements.
Manhattan is the greenest city in America, in the sense of spending the least energy per citizen.
We should be actively trying to discourage pointless energy and resource consumption, including people living in the burbs and having huge homes. I’d agree with the idea we shouldn’t be making decisions about how people spend energy if and only if we could price in all externalities related to energy production adequately. This task, I believe, is more or less impossible.
How much does the energy cost? Having this as a standard feature would be a terrible, terrible idea. The disruption to the environment would be immense.
They're completely ignoring the concept of magnitude, and realistically their claim is "we use energy for other stuff, so there's nothing wrong with using massive amounts of energy for X". They're making an implicit premise that using large amounts of energy, which causes harm to humans, is okay. If you accept that premise, okay fine, but I don't.
As another poster here shared, a single transaction uses upwards of hundreds of kwh. That kind of energy that moves thousands of pounds hundreds of miles, or power a typical US household for almost an entire month.
The other 50% is divvied up into rooms with much smaller volume and exposed surface area.
Unless we're going to recreate and replicate the dystopian Kowloon Walled City this seems pretty wasteful and will only exacerbate warming with all the increased energy requirements.
Do you really need to have a store of 11% of the city’s entire yearly energy usage? Like, 5 (almost 6!) entire weeks of energy? That seems ludicrously high to me.
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