Can we please stop pretending that Elon Musk invented well... literally anything. Zip2, Paypal, Electric cars, rockets that both take off and land, solar power, battery power storage, tunnel boring, cybernetics, LEO communications satellites, AI/LLMs, self-driving cars/robotaxis, humanoid robots, flamethrowers, eugenics, etc. Every single thing he has been involved in is an idea that has been thought of before and published and often implemented before by other people. The hyperloop is not his idea. Aside from the many, many people who have thought of it before independently, Robert Goddard published plans for a vacuum tube train about 120 years ago.

So, whether or not a hyperloop could be practical, I really wish people would stop tying ideas like this to Musk. I am aware of course that there is an intersection between his fanboys and enthusiasts for such projects and also of course that his promotion of such things is one of the reasons he acquired some of those fanboys in the first place. The problem is that he ends up muddying the discussion. I would much rather discuss the practical aspects of the concept.

I am on the fence about it myself. On the one hand, in principle, it is a perfectly valid replacement for air travel, potentially not only far more efficient, but far faster. On the other hand, practical demonstrations of a hyperloop have not really materialized so far suggesting a great deal of difficulty in getting it to work in the real world. There are, of course, a lot of critics, but I have yet to see a debubunking of the concept with any significant technical rigor. From the summary:

I mean, that's mostly a load of garbage. "Intolerable noise and disruption"? I mean, has this Christian Wolmar ever been to a city? Not to mention, does it need to reach city centers? I've been to plenty of airports and a lot of them are very distinctly not in city centers, so why would a hyperloop terminal need to be? Although it also has much more technical feasibility than dropping an airport there.

Integrating with existing transport modes... It's a train. Isn't the guy supposed to be a train expert? Trains that carry people stop at train stations, where people then get off the train and either get on another train or proceed to cars in garages, taxi stands, or lots, shuttles, boats, planes, etc. That's how terminals work. Cargo generally would not need to be carried by such a high speed train. There might be special cargo, such as a car shuttle, so that people can drive in, park their car and have it waiting for them to board at the destination. Whether or not that is possible depends on some technical aspects of the train design, but it's not as if carrying cars is an existing mode of planes or most passenger trains.

As for passenger safety at such high speeds if something goes wrong... Well, if it's a non-catastrophic thing that goes wrong, the passengers generally will be fine. If it is catastrophic, they all die, probably instantly. Basically the same as with planes, minus the terrifying last few minutes.

As for the rest of the "doubts", there seems to be no practical reason that the capacity would be much of an issue compared to planes. As for energy costs, we don't know yet, but the whole idea involves almost frictionless travel with regenerative braking at the other end, with also an additional cost to maintain the vacuum (and possibly an energy cost for cryocooling superconductors, etc. depending on design), so the theory is that it should be low energy compared to jet planes.

As far as the economics of it not working, it is obviously way to early to determine that. As it stands, it is questionable whether the economics of air travel even work, so criticism of the unknown economics of this kind of rival for air travel seems questionable.

Basically, as far as I am concerned, time will tell for this, but I don't think we should pretend this is a settled question.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yeah. I couldn't help when I read the statement by the spokesperson talking back to them in my head to point out that they are talking about pesticides. i.e. substances that kill pests through ingestion or contact. Also known as poisons. Targeted poisons, sure, but poisons nonetheless. In fact, I can't help thinking about DDT and why that was such an issue. It was precisely the same potential problem as here, it persisted in the environment without breaking down easily. Of course DDT had Chlorine instead of Fluorine. They're both halogens though. So, the more I think about it, the more this seems like DDT all over again, but possibly worse.

Completely agree. Captain Planet is a prime example, but there are so many examples of fictional villains that I used to think of as childishly unrealistic. They were not just comically evil, but pointlessly comically evil. These days I have had to seriously rethink that opinion.

If you mean by drawing some geometric shape around all of the wind turbines in a farm and then dividing the total power output by the area of that shape, I've already pointed out that it's nonsense. You also ignored the "means what in real world terms" part. Maybe you're not just selectively editing that out and you didn't know what I meant. To elaborate, the point is what is the actual significance of that number? What is the real world relationship between that number and, for example, how densely you can pack the wind turbines, or how much total available energy you can practically harvest, etc.? Why and how is this meaningful?

MacKay uses plenty of numbers, some are pretty wildly off, some are ballpark, some are accurate. He could hardly get away with fudging absolutely everything. There are plenty of parts where he didn't really need to, for example where he talked about efficiency in transportation. I will note of course that, even in that section, his numbers on, for example, electric cars do not match the performance of modern EVs because, once again, his data is old. He was writing using data that was, at best, as recent as 2007. I tried to find some data on EV car sales over time going back that far, but the best I could easily find was back to 2014 when worldwide BEV sales were ostensibly 108X less than 2024, except that it appears the 2014 numbers were being rounded up to the nearest 0.1 million, so it's probably even more. He devotes plenty of time to hydrogen as a vehicle fuel. Critically, which maybe could be considered prescient, but the point is that today, hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is still a non-starter, so all of that is outdated. His estimate of world lithium reserves is a factor of 3X lower than current estimates. Overall, yes, the numbers, other data and understanding of the energy situation are out of date in his book since they are about two decades old

I explicitly pointed out though that the actual performance of wind turbines has not changed by a lot (although it has changed). My point about MacKay's book is that there are numerous reasons to avoid it as a source because of the outdated information and the errors, whether they are accidental or due to bias and intellectual dishonesty. If you need to use a source, use modern primary sources. You have already demonstrated that you can. You also have not addressed the question of whether the numbers have any meaning. Where his numbers were not wildly off, MacKay threw in a lot of "assumptions" that were pretty obviously cherry picked. He seems to arbitrarily decide how much land use is acceptable specifically to make it work out so that he could demonstrate in graphs that renewables are not able to produce enough power to meet the needs of the UK. How does that meaningfully apply to offshore wind today.

I will note also that you have not addressed the fact that you appear to have been conflating wind power per unit area in the vertical plane with wind turbine power generation by unit of horizontal area (whether or not you're basing that number on a method that is in large part arbitrary).

What are you talking about? In what way were they "fine"? Why are you pretending that you even addressed the fudged numbers? Current UK primary power needs work out to an average production of around 220 GW (164.4 million tones of oil equivalent per year at 11,630 kWh per ton of oil equivalent divided by 365.2422, divided by 24, then divided by 1 million to convert kW to GW). 195 kWh per person per day works out, with a population of 69.718 million to about 566 GW (195 kWh times 69.718 million divided by 24 hours, then divided by 1 million to convert kW to GW). MacKay's number is over by a factor of about 2.6X. How exactly is that "fine"?

As for the other factor that you say is "fine" that you have not actually addressed, it's the method of determining power density per unit of ground area for wind plants. Why is your crude geometric method of drawing a perimeter around the wind farm and dividing the total power produced by that method remotely valid given the confounding factors I have mentioned? You did not remotely address them, but you are acting as if you somehow not only addressed them, but as if you somehow proved their irrelevance? You seem to have skipped some steps.

Look, once again, you can make whatever argument you want about wind turbines and I can address it on the merits. If you use MacKay's book as the source though, you're going to end up having to defend your source. You should just use a modern primary source instead. MacKay's book is not academically rigorous (there's an extensive bibliography, for example, but next to no in-text citations), not properly peer reviewed, clearly biased (during the sections on nuclear power, he treats criticisms of nuclear power like personal insults). It has a pretension towards being neutral and factual to the degree that it puts on airs of being the only source that actually bothers using arithmetic and analysis to examine power issues. It is outdated. It has been critically reviewed with the numerous problems pointed out many times. MacKay himself, towards the end of his life, started abandoning the pretense and making his pro-nuclear bias abundantly clear.

Which is measured how and actually means what in real world terms? The point of using it in his book was to tell the reader that a renewable uses X amount of land and that nuclear only uses some fraction of X land, therefore nuclear is better while ignoring that the land can be used for multiple purposes at the same time. He may well have had reasonable numbers for some things, but he fudged numbers for a lot of other things, so he's not a reliable source. Also, it makes no sense whatsoever for you to have used his book as a resource in the first place when you have actual, up to date references.

What land area? Are you simply ignoring that the wind farm does not actually consume the land between the limited footprints of the actual towers? It can still be farmed on, lived on, have factories built on it, have a solar farm built on it, etc., etc., etc.

Ok....? If I build four nuclear 1 GWe plants and call it a nuclear farm and build them in a square configuration with one at each corner and the linear distance of the sides of the square is about 200 km, then the Watts per square meter is You need to leave space between turbines...

Uh, yeah, of course you do. The point is that the wind turbines don't consume that space. The thing is, I'm not sure anyone in this discussion is talking about the same thing. For example, earlier in the conversation, you note that you think the w/m^2 in that article are high and you then cite MacKay. The problem is, MacKay is talking about land area, whereas the article you were criticizing there was clear that it was talking about the area of the VERTICAL PLANE (not yelling, just for emphasis). You're comparing apples and oranges and citing an old and clearly biased source. MacKay may have been a good with computer science, but the details of his career indicate that he was intellectually dishonest when it comes to energy in order to push his own agenda. The book and other details make it appear, from my opinion, that his intention was always to give lip service to renewables, but only to develop a following that he could then steer to the conclusion that only nuclear energy could work. Citing his book hurts anyone's argument for me. Why even cite him when you could have gone with primary sources?

Well, there was quite a lot of hot air in there really, both figuratively and literally since he was clearly a closet nuclear shill.

Well, technically, it has changed at the Earth's surface due to reduction in certain types of pollution. For all intents and purposes I suppose we can say it has not though.

Well, the change you state there is a 25% increase, so that's nothing to sneeze at. The panels have also certainly become cheaper.

Anyway, in the end, I stand by what I said, you selected, quite unnecessarily, a biased source that many have held up to a rigorous analysis and found lacking.

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. Obviously this is off by orders of magnitude and is a manipulated figure obtained by using the entire land area of a wind farm rather than just the land area that a turbine takes up, ignoring the fact that wind farms don't consume the land they sit on except at the very base of the tower. For a back of the envelope calculation, consider a 6 MW nameplate turbine that, with a standard capacity factor, produces 2 MW. Even if you consider the base to be as wide as the blades (which is not even realistic since you can pretty much use the land right to the actual bottom of the steel tower one way or another), that would be about 18,626 square meters for a 154 meter wide set of blades. That would be around 107 Watts per square meter even then, which is a good deal more than an order of magnitude larger than MacKay's numbers. If you use a realistic idea of the land area taken up, which would be inside the diameter of the blades, the number would be at least two orders of magnitude larger than MacKay's numbers.

At the same time, MacKay uses over-generous numbers to make the land footprint of a nuclear plant smaller than it really is when you consider external factors like the uranium mining land use, offsite processing facilities, watershed area, time issues, etc. MacKay is clearly using land area as the most important criteria in the first place in an attempt to favor nuclear and also clearly fudging his numbers to make it look as good as possible.

He also estimates that every person in the UK uses about 195 kWh per day. Then he stacks that up against his estimate of how much could possibly be generated in Britain and, oh no, the stack for renewable power generation comes up short. Now, this is primary power, not just electrical usage, to be clear. Even then though, that is too high. Going by current primary power figures for Britain of 164.4 tonnes of oil equivalent and a population of 69.718 million, it comes out for me to around 75 kWh per day per person. Now, maybe that's him being dishonest, or maybe it's just the fact that, as I mentioned, he is working with outdated information. Or, possibly the stats I can find on primary power usage in the UK are off, but I checked two sources and they seem to check out within about 10 kWh of each other.

As for technological changes, solar cells have become more efficient and much cheaper. While there is not a lot of room for improvement in the efficiency of turbines, wind turbines have improved in various ways. One of the changes is for them to trend larger so that they capture more wind in one spot. Basically there have been various changes that enlarge the stack of power that can be generated.

To re-iterate, the data in MacKay's book, aside from other problems, is simply outdated.

You were implying a repeating pattern, but not actually identifying any repeating pattern.

Average US household drives 14,200 miles per year. That's 37.88 miles per day. The average EV gets around 3.5 miles to the kWh. That's about 11 kWh per day (ugh, technically three time units that should be cancelling each other there, that's why I hate kWh as a measure). The average us household uses 30 kWh of electricity per day. So, the increase to power EVs would be about 36.7%. Sure, it's an increase, but it's not some fantastical number. Also, it's weird how you're acting as if power generation is some sort of zero-sum game. It's simple economics, if there is a demand, supply is increased to meet it. Also, that additional demand for EVs can also be met just from reducing wasted power from households. It is notable that power usage in many developed countries is more like 20 kWh per day per household. So just some basic increases in energy efficiency in the US would provide enough surplus to meet the EV demand.

For starters, people who want to electrify everything in order to be more environmentally sound tend to want to use renewables for power. Aside from that, if a combined cycle gas plant is 60% efficient and that power runs a 400% efficient heat pump, then that's a 2.4X reduction in the amount of natural gas that would otherwise be needed to heat the home.

That is clearly not what you said. You clearly talked about clear cutting forests for GE crops and data centers. In any case, you don't need to clear cut forests for solar farms, there are plenty of unforested areas to put them in, and climates that are good for forests are not always the best for solar farms anyway. Regarding your math with numbers pulled out of nowhere like 10GW, 500W per square meter of panel (pretty extraordinary since that would need to be a record breaking 50% efficient panel) and 20 billion panels... ??? 20 billion 500W panels would generate 10 TeraWatts. I mean, if you want to make a mathematical argument, use actual numbers and actual math.

Which, while bad, has nothing to do with EVs and fossil fuels.

Sure. So do fairy dust and unicorn farts. Just as soon as we have the fairy dust harvesting operations and unicorn fart extractors up and running - oh, and solve the pesky problem of capturing magical creatures - and actually establish even a basic baseline of the real cost, they will clearly outcompete renewables. That seems to be your argument in a nutshell.

So, you're not even hand waving away all the technical problems with fusion reactors (beyond the ones I myself ignored such as actually getting a stable, repeatable breakeven reaction to work in the first place), but simply completely ignoring that I even mentioned them? Name-dropping the concept of economy of scale does not explain how fundamental issues will be solved. If you're going to be honest about this at all, then you need to actually address how those problems will be solved. Just mentioning Helion and CFS and claiming that their existence proves that they have solved these problems is nuts. Seriously, Helion was supposed to have net energy 8/9 years ago and a working 50 MWe plant 6 years ago. Where are they now? CFS does not appear to be outright lying about their timeline in the same way as Helion obviously is, but they are clearly still overly optimistic. Their plan for shielding the gear used to generate the magnetic shielding is a "molten salt blanket". It seems like a pure fantasy to believe that electronics won't be burned out beyond repair every few months or less. It is hard to believe there could possibly be an operational cost per unit of heat that would be lower than a fission reactor and, once again, the rest of the plant will still need to be a giant steam engine.

Basically, you're just fantasizing about possible future technology. All well and good, but there are certain technologies we have now and for possible future technologies, there are varying degrees of probability of their success. Holding out for what is currently just science fiction will not help us now. Calling me -- the one advocating for basing energy policy on systems that actually exist in the here and now -- nuts seems deeply ironic here.

Well, to be fair, one of the reasons they maybe don't explain things so well is that their plan is basically to "blot out the sun". Basically, they plain to stain the sky so that less sun will get through. While, yes, this would reduce temperatures on Earth, it would also dim the sun, which means that, among other issues, agricultural land will become less productive. They obviously don't want to go into the consequences of that or who will pay for the damages to every farmer on Earth.

First, how is any of that the "same old song and dance"? When has this played out before in history?

As far as EV's go, there is no real issue with producing enough power to operate an EV. If there were, then there would be an equally as large or larger problem with fueling up an equivalent ICEV. There's no whining involved, it's just basic supply and demand economics.

As for natural gas, most people are not dumb enough to not realize it is a fossil fuel. Electric heating for homes using heat pumps is vastly more efficient than any form of fossil fuel heating, including gas. Electric cooking is also considerably more efficient than gas cooking with the right equipment.

As for the bit about clear cutting forests for genetically engineered crops and data centers.... You really lost me there. What does that have to do with the topic? How do you think in any way that there is any significant overlap between people who want renewable power and those who want to clear cut forests to plant GE crops and put up data centers?

No, no! Don't forget, they hand waved in "... combined with a type of fusion..." to the process, explaining where the extra energy comes from. I mean, it is complete and utter nonsense since there seems to be no conceivable way that human beings would ever need to be a mediator for the energy in that case. For me, I simply head canon that into the notion that nearly everyone, humans and machines alike simply believes a bunch of lies about what is really going on. I mean, it fits the general theme of reality not being what you think it is, and the rest of the movies have plenty of support for the idea that few really understand what is actually going on (for example the revelation that even the humans who have "escaped' the Matrix are still just pawns of a larger system and that the oldest escaped humans know it).

Sorry, but it's not looking like practical fusion power generation is remotely on the horizon. Even if it really is just thirty years away until we get fusion that outputs more power than the input power required to generate it (we have reached various "breakeven" points, but not actually that one), that does not solve any real problems. As it stands, a true breakeven fusion reactor would, at best, be a drop in replacement for a fission reactor in a power plant. In other words, just a big heat supply to drive a steam engine. We would still need pretty much all of the rest of the plant. To reduce costs at all, the fusion reactor would need to produce more heat per dollar than the fission reactor and, just because it can produce more heat per unit mass of fuel does not translate to lower cost. Consider that a fission reactor is mostly relatively simple mechanical design exposed to massive radiation. A fusion reactor would have to be very sophisticated electronic parts exposed to massive radiation. Finding a way to produce the magnetic confinement you would need through enough shielding to protect the components needed to produce and regulate the confinement seems like a pretty big challenge, and not one that is going to be cheap. Even if some magical way is found to reduce the cost of heat produced significantly, that's only one part of the plant. The rest of it is a massive industrial operation that still costs a huge amount of money to build and operate and we don't have any prospective technology on the horizon that would replace it. It's not even clear that, if the heat generating nuclear reactor part (whether fission or fusion) were completely free, it would cost less than renewables.

I mean, fusion power would be cool, and would certainly have niche applications, but I don't see it actually being practical for most power generation any time soon.

While I can't say that I know the specifics of Britain's electricity billing, there is a general answer to that question that usually holds true in most places. Part of that answer is that a significant part (frequently the major part) of people's electricity bills tends to be distribution, not supply. Another part is that energy projects generally have a long tail when it comes to financing. The electricity bill is being used to pay for energy projects (including plenty of failed ones which were theoretically private, but being financed or guaranteed by the public) from decades ago, not just current generation. Whether those costs get buried in the supply side of the bill or the distribution side may vary. Also, depending on the location and local politics, the electricity bill might only be part of it and other taxes may reduce the bill or, alternatively, the bill may also be used as a way to tax the public for other things as well.

The point is that it is ridiculous to look at your power bill and draw any conclusions about the costs of renewables. They may theoretically bring your bill down, but probably not for decades.

You just referenced Dr. MacKay's book. That is one of MacMann's favorite references. I've been over it and t is full of faulty information. Aside from that, the information in it is just old. Dr. MacKay died about a decade ago and wrote the book about two decades ago largely with data from about a decade before that. Too much has happened both in terms of technological change and data collection since then for the book to be taken seriously.

MacKay was surely an intelligent man and he had some real accomplishments in the field of computer science. When it comes to his studies on renewables though, he definitely fudged even the figures available at the time in favor of nuclear power. Sadly to the point where I can't just give him the benefit of the doubt that it was just a little bias creeping in and have to conclude that he had to know he was doing it, making it academic dishonesty. Possibly why his book was not peer reviewed and was self-published despite being touted as an academic approach to the topic. His actual academic background was theoretical and experimental physics, which might have predisposed him to his belief in the superiority of nuclear power.