Bitcoin mining is a more unfortunate one but also pretty typical.

Buying a bunch of expensive equipment and operating it 10 hours a day vs. 24 hours a day is usually not economical. The uses where this make sense are quite rare.

For example training AI models is often cited - but when you're buying $1B of GPUs to stuff in a datacenter that have a 3 year useful lifespan - you are effectively cutting your amortization schedule in half. It would require some really expensive energy to make that pencil out.

Energy storage of various types are probably the currently best bet, but those also have the same problem. Vehicle charging is a clear win, but also a low hanging fruit that is already well in play.

If you can do demand based pricing, you could even end up with new time arbitrage business models. A battery farm or hydro facility stores energy when rates are cheap and discharges when rates go up.

it may be a plus for solar if it can be shown that the shadow from the panels is a good thing in those cases

There is also probably enough toxic/polluted wasteland around so that solar can be built there without taking "good" lands.

It may be that AI will happen to be the savior of this planet - by creating huge demand for energy it will allow the cheapest - i.e. renewables - to get into dominating market position, and may be Big Tech would even get into and productize the fusion.

I think rooftop solar is also excellent, but only in theory. In practice, I feel like rooftop solar allows public utilities to abdicate their responsibility. It diminishes the affect of collective pressure on major energy producers to hold up their end of the bargain to invest in clean energy because it shifts costs to homeowners and effectively makes them a very weak competitor to big energy producers. A power grid full of smart systems and robust transmission lines is an amazing resource - but it is very capital intensive. How do we replace that with rooftop solar that many homeowners seek loans to install? How does that incentivize power companies, who are allowed to operate monopolies, to invest in clean energy infrastructure?

As somebody who lives in the Southwest US, thank you. There are so many people on HN who think the desert is just Martian dunes to be paved over like a Civ tile.

Just in the hills around me there are 30 species of plant, century-old trees, snakes, lizards, horny toads, bobcats, coyotes, hare, quail, multitudes of ants, the incredible red velvet mite, roadrunners (yes they’re real), flies, wasps, native bumblebees, mice, god it goes on and on. And the soil is encrusted, literally, with countless microbiota. In fact a single vehicle smashing it can damage that crust for years.

I know we need renewables, and yes, the Southwest is a great place for solar. But there is real ecological damage to some of the most pristine places left in America involved in developing unused land.

I take no position on the development which is under discussion here, or whether the cancellation was fair. I haven’t researched it, and probably never will. I’m just sick of the “it’s just desert, who cares, paint it with solar/oil fields/asphalt” attitude that’s everywhere.

More to the point, if we can't build a solar plant here than we're never going to build one in this country, let alone the rare earth mines or anything else we would need for a green transition.

What they should do, scientifically, is adapt, like all organisms.

The irony is those demanding we change our behavior to reverse climate change are the ones actually fighting to keep humans from changing by adapting to changing climatic conditions, and so they are the biggest threat to human survival as a species.

We're gonna burn every deep of oil. Petroleum use goes up every year, regardless.

This is usually preceded by those that can afford to have played got to that point because they too did not follow any regulations when they started. They are only now willing to follow regulations because they can afford to knowing that it is a worthy expense to keep new competition from starting

Ecological disaster averted.

He said when a source is known to lie the proper weight to apply to anything they say is 0.0.

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