I'm a weird duck on the renewable energy pond in that I have a near-reverence for fossil fuels.
It seems glaringly evident to me that the single biggest lever humanity has pulled to skyrocket us from slave-mule world to self-driving EV, AI, gene-sequencing, etc. world in under two centuries is the fossil fuel energy lever.
From a basic physics definition, energy is simply the ability to do work.
We did more work In the last hundred years than in the combined work total of all prior human history.
If that sounds preposterous, imagine pushing your car thirty miles, and then consider it only takes a gallon of gas to do the same work, and that we burned 135 Billion gallons in 2022 alone, just in the U.S. Just gasoline.
We did a LOT of work. And work carries with it the potential to make things better.
And bc I'm acutely aware that two-thirds to ninety percent of Americans would perish within a year of a total grid failure, and that that grid is not currently powerable if we decided to "End Oil Now!", I just can't get on board with the people plastering themselves to Picassos.
I respect my fossil fuel elders so to speak, bc w/o fossil fuels freeing up the brightest minds from ag-tivities and making it possible to connect and create, there would have never been a solar module invented, much less mass produced and mass shipped and affordable that endures for decades.
Like any observant youth, I'm also aware of my elders' limitations. Lovingly.
I know it's just not possible to build a pipeline as wide as the sky, but bless their hearts if they're not gonna try.
It's just not possible to lower the cost of fossil fuels, buried under land owned by people, to zero, and zero's the price of sunlight today and the next hundred million years.
It's just not possible for a power plant with a million moving parts to be as simple to maintain as a solar + storage system with moving parts numbering zero. Friction, yo.
It's just not possible for a diesel peaker generator to provide power to the grid faster than a battery.
It's just not possible to ever burn enough fossil fuels to match the power epoch we're being invited to enter by truly unlocking the power of the Sun.
I love nuclear and space based solar, wind, synthetic fuels produced from renewables, hydrogen, geothermal--all of it. Access to Energy is a fundamentally good thing.
But this is a post about fossil fuels, and the amazing world they have now opened up the possibility of creating--one of near-zero-marginal cost, super-abundant energy.
Thank you fossil fuels. You've been amazing. I see what you continue to do for us today and am grateful for all the work by all the bright humans it takes all over the world every single day to provide access to your power for so many people to do super-power level work. You literally move mountains. We couldn't build a solar-powered world without you.
#energy #fossilfuels #solar
