… Do you mean turn OFF everything at night? Because you do realize that the output of solar power at night, you know, when the solar part is missing, is zero, right???

And wind can’t get anywhere near the difference, even assuming it’s running at 100%. Not to mention many things need to continue running at night. Like hospitals.

And that’s before I even got to the absurdity of tech companies using computational work as a sink. Computational work doing what, exactly? Rendering 3D farting fairies??? And that’s not even getting into how they’re the main cause of increased energy usage recently preventing us from catching up with demands in the first place, mostly because of AI.

And the back up batteries only at sensitive sites - so you just expect people to freeze to death in Winter or during a heatwave? To not eat because they can’t heat anything up? What about comms. Most towers are in places where there’s not enough space for local battery sites. “Mandating rooftop solar” sure, but you’d still also have to “mandate” that it’s free because many weight be able to afford it.

As for the reason I said you should play this games, it’s to make you realize how difficult it would be to run everything purely on solar and wind and without batteries, EVEN WITH future tech and perfect weather with no inhabitants like in Satisfactory. You’ll either need good sources of hydro in every possible spot on the map (at which point, in real life, you’d definitely be altering the environment, + climate change is affecting that too in reality) or a massive battery storage site / so many distributed batteries you’ve accomplished the same thing anyhow. You’ll fucking realize energy demands can be so damn high, the struggle isn’t “what to do with all this power” but “I need more power / need power at night”, constantly, even with magic future solar tech on a planet with a binary system.

You’re clearly both too uninformed AND misinformed to continue this conversation. At best what you do now is help the fossil fuel industry with how ignorant you are - at worst you’re a troll willingly doing so.

Yes, except that takes a long time, and in the meantime electricity usage fluctuates with spikes and continued growth. That’s without counting other possible issues, like dropped outputs due to weather (hurricanes, lightning strikes, winter in a northern latitude, etc). Tell me, how do we build enough energy production to cover usage when both lines go up? And what about while water creation plants are constructed?

Ideally, we end up in the situation you describe, yes, but even then we would need back up storage because things can and do go wrong, and output won’t always be consistent and neither will use. And then there’s the whole issue with using solar at night.

Play something like Factorio or Satisfactory with certain mods, and you’ll get a small idea of how difficult it is to keep load balance even with machines running to use extra energy.

I agree it’s complicated, if you make it so.

In terms of scale, direct kills are a rounding error compared to the damage of climate change.

In terms of indirect kills, like accidents, coal still beats hydropower by a long shot if you include the actual history of coal and steam boats, in part simply from a lack of standards or care in safety (and that’s even if you exclude coal lung as an indirect kill).

While you make perfect the enemy of good, the world will burn, just as those who own the fossil fuels desire.

That’s only a solution for when energy demand won’t spike or increase.

The issue is that currently energy demand does spike and increase.

I’m pretty sure cancers and other health issues have killed way, way more than hydroelectric.

Not including the climate change thing…

Maybe they hired the political strategists that keep making most Americans vote against their self interests as their sales team

Well, at least Mistral is open source I guess :/