this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2024
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I wasn't aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.

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[–] VirtualOdour@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago

It doesn't have to be storage, another option is building over capacity so it's winter output is sufficient then using the excess in summer months to perform useful work.

For example a desalination and pumping station at the mouth of the Arizona River, you can scale the pumping from a storage lake by the desalination plant to one or more of the upriver lakes raising their water levels to replace the water used for industry and agricultural.

Carbon capture and manufacture of e-fuels or similar is another great possibility, it can be scaled with energy production vastly reducing the cost of the process and allowing further transition from oil in areas which might otherwise be difficult.

E-chems are important because there's a few things which are vitally important to modern industry but currently produced fairly cheep as an oil by-product, if demand for oil derived fuel declines as we hope and production falls dramatically then the price of those chemicals would skyrocket - being able to transition into using sequestered carbon would save a lot of difficulty, and if it helps create a market for sequestered carbon it could help us start bring atmospheric co2 ppm down slowly.