ok, the subject’s overstating it, of course, but I get some people that wonder why I’m in favor of electric vehicles (which thankfully is no longer putting me in the minority it once did). It’s really just a simple matter of decoupling producers of energy from consumers.
How many ways are there of generating the 87 octane unleaded you find at a typical gas station? Not all that many - find it in the ground, drill it out, refine it, ship it.
How many ways of there of generating electricity? Many more.
However, the key point isn’t really about the ways of generating electricity that we have today (although those are definitely good places to start), it’s about the unknown ways we’ll be generating electricity in the future.
Production methods all fan-in to electricity as the universal energy medium.
Consumer methods all fan-out from electricity as the universal energy medium.
Once that’s happening, we can just keep switching ways we generate electricity on an ongoing basis. There’s no need to deal with all the headaches and chicken-and-egg production/consumption pipeline issues like we have with other alternatives (hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol, biodiesels, etc). That doesn’t mean the other forms of energy are bad - they just don’t come in a form that we already have full infrastructure for, that most of our energy is already consumed in (air conditioning, computers, most everything in a typical house), and that we have over a century of experience with.
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95. We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.
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