Which figures? Land usage figures? Because that is mostly what he focuses on and he exaggerates the land usage of wind turbines to a fantastical degree, pinning it at 2 Watts per square meter.

He has it at 3 offshore. The London Array runs at about 3.2.

You've given a lot of reasons why he's wrong but the figures disagree. All I did was divide the yearly output buy a year and the land area.

Bu the way, Seagreen 1A is about 0.3 W/m2.

That would be around 107 Watts per square meter

You need to leave space between turbines...

Now, this is primary power, not just electrical usage, to be clear.

Yes, the book is sustainable energy without the hot air, not just sustainable electricity for current usages.

As for technological changes, solar cells have become more efficient and much cheaper.

A bit but insolation has not changed. Mackay quoted 20%,the best rooftop panels are about 25 now. So out of date, but it's not a huge change, either.

Will the personnel be outsourced to India, Pakistan, et al?

Notice they said absolutely nothing about using it to target keyword ads at you, build profiles about you to target you with ads, and whatever else they're doing with the data to push more bullshit ads on you. The only smart feature is to disable the account and use something else that respects your privacy.

In fairness this has always been called game AI.

There's worse ideas.

In practice the US has a lot of space and sunny weather, and tech has advanced. That combined with the regulatory environment means renewables are almost certainly going to be quicker to build up to the capacity needed.

But like I said, there are worse ideas.

You just referenced Dr. MacKay's book.

Yep.

I've been over it and t is full of faulty information. Aside from that, the information in it is just old.

So you say. And yet, his figures for wind farms match closely what the London Array which was commissioned in 2018. Tech does advance, but it's not going to yield an order of magnitude change in energy density.

Too much has happened both in terms of technological change and data collection since then for the book to be taken seriously.

Like what? Now floating turbines exist which do remove the 100m deep water limit he talks about. They are still experimental tech, basically and very expensive. Water depth maps haven't changed, and average wind speeds haven't that much either. His numbers appear to match current deployments.

Sam D is very good, and I think his analysis is broadly correct, but I would be wary of treating him as apolitical. He's a leading thinker for the centre-right, along with Sam Bowman (Sam Freedman completes the clever-Sam-centrist trifecta, but is on the left rather than right).

I've not actually encountered this chap before. This particular article didn't strike me (at a first read) as obviously politically biased. For example about how the conservation laws aren't in his opinion achieving the aims they intend to achieve, which I don't disagree with. I'm strongly conservationist (that's political), but despite stringent laws (they stop a lot) our biodiversity is still crashing, so to me the laws aren't working.

With the caveat that now just about everything appears to be political. Starmer's solution seems to be to cherry pick cauldron species, insult people who care, then just give up.

This. Energy *is* civilization, meaning more about ndant and *cheaper* energy advances our standard of living. I have nothing against renewables (we have solar on the roof), but: misguided emphasis on renewables has made energy a lot more expensive. That is the opposite of progress.

Yeah we're taking about the tunneling under the city bit. You're not going to tunnel all the way from SF to LA.

There is no way half that distance is as dense as central London. One of the feats that paid for was threading the line between an escalator and a rail tunnel with tolerances in the centimetres. They also built massive, high capacity interchanges with existing high capacity stations, something which isn't really much of a problem in California. You can leave that to later.

Not building the line itself, but everything else around it.

Yes, but it isn't thaaat hard: you need all of those things for interstates and equivalently fast roads too.

I've lived near a train line, and it really kind of sucks.

I kind of wonder how it sucked so badly. I used to live so close to a train station that if I opened a window I could hear just the announcements about how late my train was. Fuck you worst crapital connect. You won't be missed. It was a residential road that backed on to (but didn't access) the carpark. I got more road noise than train noise.

The one time I really really heard a train was when a steam train went by, and well yeah that was loud but so cool, and happened once in 4 years.

I'm not saying your experience didn't suck, but modern, well maintained trains are pretty quiet.

Today they have to run right through the middles of cities for much of their length.

We can do that. London recently got crossrail. It cost about 14 billion. That was a tunnel under London, a dense city already very full of underground lines and tunnels, with huge new station additions built to minimize disruption and top notch infrastructure, currently running (peak) a train every 150 seconds. It can move about as many people per hour peak, per direction, as the busiest parts of HWY 401 does (25000 veh/hr vs 36000 passengers per hour per direction).

The problem is that the US has become unable to build large projects, some of this due to laws intended to protect the environment but now delaying or preventing the development of high speed rail, wind, solar and nuclear power.

We have those too. I earlier today read these three articles:

https://martinrobbins.substack...

https://www.samdumitriu.com/p/...

https://nickmaini.substack.com...

They are somewhat apolitical, largely blame free looks at how we have ended up here, and why. UK obviously, not US, but may strike a chord.

If free market is preferred, then no state will legislate maximum number of flights, or ban flights under x miles like in France.

It's not a free market if you can force costs onto other people. French trains are very very very low carbon.

We don't have to make everything domestically. It would be nice, but right now we should just import the turbines we need and get them deployed.

I agree.

The climate can't wait, and we shouldn't wait to start raking in that cash.

I think you're underselling the complexity, but yes we should continue. But super deep water and probably even normal deep water turbines aren't a goldmine, not yet. Shallow ones however...

Hmm, I think that book has been discredited.

My whom and based on wgat? His numbers for offshore wind in terms of W/m^2 are pretty much spot on wind farms that were installed after publication. I looked up the numbers for the London Array and it's well within error bounds?

We have the best wind resources in Europe, we could be raking it in from exports.

We should certainly be building more, a lot more really. We don't have the heavy industry, though with the amount we should be building we'd be best off spinning it up here in the long run.

Geothermal is already workable. Ask the people in Iceland where it accounts for over of the country's power generation. The reason it's not everywhere is that unless you live next to a volcano or other geological features that put out enough heat, there's no way to tap into it other than transmitting the power from those places. Making it even more efficient or increasing the output are certainly things we should do as well, but geothermal is already working now. I like it better than solar or wind because the power generated doesn't fluctuate like those others do and hence there's less reliance on batteries if the sun isn't shining or the wind isn't blowing.