Comment Re:Its going to happen whether we want it to or no (Score 1) 117
You're right... we've never had any kind of energy crisis before (like the oil crisis), or a shortage of metals (like during WW2).
What kind of strawman is that? I never said anything about never having had an energy crisis or shortage of metals before. I said that we had never replaced ICE vehicles with EVs and had problems finding enough electricity to charge them either previously or now.
About 40% of US corn is used for making ethanol (for E-85), which is added to fossil fuel
I am not sure what your point is here. As it is, plants are not as efficient at producing energy from sunlight as solar panels are, also corn is not the best energy crop anyway, and additionally making ethanol from an energy crop involves multiple steps that waste energy at each step. Might as well just burn the corn directly if you're using it to make electricity. Corn ethanol exists because there is a powerful corn lobby in the US that gets corn subsidized and also because, after the subsidies, ethanol is a cheap way to raise the octane rating of fuel (ethanol has an octane rating of 100-109, equal to or higher than iso-octane itself) which is useful for the petroleum industry in their "premium" gasoline scam.
You do realize that the idiots in charge of finding places to put the datacenters to run the idiotic LLM-AIs are going to cram the buildings anyplace they can, regardless of what they bulldoze or clearcut... and, then they're going to build the solar field near it (closer means less transmission loss, which for a power hungry thing like that is important).
They will put them at what they think is the optimal overlap of cheap land, electrical access and available data bandwidth. While they indeed don't care what they clear cut, the locations are still unlikely to be in forests. Also, aside from that, while they certainly are not environmentally sound, data centers are generally pretty compact in terms of land use, so this is pretty ridiculous. As for transmission loss, it is small enough that colocation of solar or wind power makes little sense for large, power hungry installations unless somehow the location is also perfect for solar or wind. It is actually more logistically sound to put solar and wind where they produce the most power and transmit that power.
Re: Households: Oh, yeah... less power usage in US homes where the kids each need their own TV, game console, computer, cell phone, as do the parents.... two EVs (one for each parent), all the appliances are "smart appliances (even the stupid toaster)" so they're all always on, the central air system is online also. Do we just flip the breaker for all the TVs and game consoles and computers when they're not being used?
In the US, the majority of household power is used for heating and cooling at around 52% with the second largest usage being water heating at about 18%, so those together account for 70% of usage. Now, to be clear, those are not all electrical in all homes. Obviously some homes use natural gas or even oil (sometimes wood) for heating and/or hot water though virtually never for refrigeration (technically you can have fossil fuel powered refrigerators like in many RVs, though even those are moving to battery and solar power). However, enough of that portion of household usage is electrical for it to still be a significant fraction of average household electrical usage. Refrigeration is around 5%, other appliances for cleaning, cooking, etc. take up somewhere in the neighborhood of 10% with lighting being around 7%. So the categories you mentioned (except for "central air" which falls under heating and cooling, which I covered, and of course EVs, which are also clearly covered in what I said before with typical miles driven per household) are only about 10% of household usage. So, aside from the TVs, game consoles, computers, cell phones, and unnecessarily "smart" devices, the other categories I mentioned are all devices that have a lot of room for improvement: heating and cooling can be significantly improved just by improving features like insulation and other passive heat control measures in many homes. Then the active heating/cooling measures have huge room for efficiency improvement as well, such as by replacing many existing systems with modern, high-efficiency heat pumps. Ditto for water heating. Heat pump-based water heaters can provide huge improvements. For refrigerators and other home appliances that I mentioned, there's clearly room for plenty of improvement in efficiency with much more efficient versions of refrigerators, washing machines, dishwashers, dryers available, and things like induction cooking, etc. available. For lighting, even though LED lighting has made a huge improvement and is nearly universal now, easily fifty percent of lighting power usage could be eliminated if homes had occupancy sensors installed to control lighting.
As for the TVs, game consoles, computers, cell phones, and unnecessary "smart" features of devices, IoT and all that, yes there is waste there. There is definitely room for improvement and I certainly agree that there are too many devices that simply never power off (although it's not like you actually need to go for the breakers when they plug into the wall or even into a power strip that has its own power switch - on that note I should point out that the "central air" is normally on a thermostat). Still, they're only a small percentage of overall usage and what room for improvement there is, if improved, would lower that as well.
Ultimately, just in the context of household EV usage, the extra power needed could be made up for by home efficiency improvements. So, the argument I made still stands. I should point out in addition though that household electricity usage is only about 38% of total electricity usage in the first place, and EV power would only be a fraction of that so, even if not offset by household efficiency improvements (which it certainly could be), it would not be a significant increase in electrical usage.
So, let's say a 3GW datacenter... they can cover a town in solar panels and that works during the day, what about at night? "Store the excess power in a big rack of batteries" assumes there is any excess power.
I can't even understand what you're trying to argue here. I mean, aside from positing a data center with power requirements at least an order of magnitude larger than any singular existing facility, making the bizarre assumption that it would operate solely using solar power, and making the other bizarre assumption that engineers designing a data center that runs only on solar power and battery storage would somehow forget that they would need to build out enough solar capacity to charge the batteries, what is the actual point?
Ultimately, aside from some general ranting and apparently subscribing to the nonsense anti-EV theory that somehow electrical power availability can't scale to support them, it is hard to discern what you are ultimately actually trying to say with all of this.