Politikk, religion og samfunn Fremtidens energi

[Terje-A]

Vi er helt avhengig av datasentrene som bygges. Det er flott at dette bygges i Norge, men vi må følge opp med mer kraft. Vind og sol er bra det, men vi er helt avhengig av å ha kraft som leverer 24/7, og da er det kun mer vannkraft og ikke minst atomkraft som er løsningen. Og det haster.

 

[Mar-a-Lago Club]

That is why you can go on Reddit and find long exchanges about, say, how to keep jerrycans of diesel fuel fresh over the years. (It turns out that diesel can grow algae – the consensus on the forum is that if you store it in metal cans in the dark you are probably good for a couple of years, though you may want to buy some “diesel biocide” just in case. Here’s some available online, just $185 a gallon.)

But say you imagine the emergency might last a little longer – then things just keep getting harder. Here’s how one prepper on the forum outlined his dilemma:

I currently have three 275 gallon fuel oil tanks. 2 are in my basement and filled with diesel. One will be put somewhere outside with gasoline. I just picked up 3 70s-80’s vintage gas pumps that are supposedly in working order. What is everyone doing for home refueling? Concrete pads for the pumps and tanks? What are you doing to protect the pumps from getting run into or damaged from snowplows? How are you ensuring 250+ gallons of gas gets turned over and refilled before it goes bad? I was thinking of selling to close friends and neighbors either at cost or at a slight loss to make sure the fuel is always fresh.

I guess that might be workable – running your own gas station for your neighbors, albeit at a slight loss. (If they’re old like me, you could lure them in with free drinking glasses.)

But say the emergency goes on longer than that, and you have to refill your tanks. At some point you are likely to realize what an incredibly complicated system you have tied yourself into, with multiple failure points everywhere. To get oil these days you basically need a company sophisticated enough to drill a couple of miles below the ocean; to get natural gas you need drillers able to detonate explosives miles beneath the Earth’s surface to “frack” the deposits into flowing. And then you need to be able to pipe your crude to a massive refinery where it can be separated into various components, and then a fleet of trucks to carry it to gas stations and so on. Once you have it, the engine that it goes in has to be properly maintained – there’s a lot of engineering involved in making a flammable liquid burn at a steady pace and, say, move power to wheels, which is why there are about 2,000 parts in the drivetrain of an internal combustion vehicle. Any of them can and do break, at which point you would better have a pretty good stock in your bunker unless you are absolutely sure your local Pep Boys is going to be up and running.

Or – and bear with me here a minute – you could go solar. Again, I understand that Trump hates it. “It’s all steel and glass and wires,” he told a California gathering shortly before the last election. “It looks like hell. And you see rabbits get caught in it … It’s just terrible.” But maybe aesthetics is not your primary concern and maybe you hunt rabbits, anyway – in that case, solar has a lot to recommend it for us average paranoiacs. In fact, I think you could go so far as to say that it is the one form of power that matches up almost perfectly with a rational conservative outlook: if you look at it one way, it is energy for hyper-individualists.

The climate solution both the right and the left can get behind | Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben: We’re beyond Mel Gibson’s Mad Max era. We no longer need oil to make it through the apocalypse

www.theguardian.com