It’s 2023, we are witnessing a huge shift towards clean energy and tons of money and research is being poured into renewables.
But it’s got me thinking, if we did this 20-30 years ago would all the new technology we see today be pretty standard by 2023? Or has there been some big innovations in recent years that would’ve only had been possible in recent times?
A couple examples
Batteries, we are still yet to fully utilise these for energy grid storage and electric vehicles are only now just getting up to the range that a petrol car can do. Would that have been possible in the past considering the first commercial lithium ion battery was released in the 90s?Solid state batteries seem to be like a real boost for renewables yet they are still to be properly used.
Solar panels, wind turbines and other power generation technology. Would they be stock standard or was their efficiency and cost just not possible to overcome until recent times?
Airplanes and other long haul transport, biofuels are what seems to the most likely alternative unless batteries get much better. But these seem to be much later down the track.
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I mean I think its kind of a mistake to hinge everything on batteries and battery technologies and now and EVs
We’ve decided that every single person MUST own a car and they must own a car to do everything, want to go pick up some milk and a loaf of bread, better have a car. want to do any activity ever? buy a car and drive to it, etc.. etc..
and now the answer to getting rid of gas cars is now an EV which is even more expensive than a gas car, and given how much in North America doesn’t even want a car anymore the highest selling vehicles are large trucks and SUVs and would never drive anything as reasonable as a medium size car from 20 years ago the EVs have to be massive too
if we just gave even a reasonably small fraction of the money we spent on car infrastructure on public transportation, trains, busses and bike infrastructure we wouldn’t have to try and lean on the technology of batteries so heavily.
Everyone having to own a car to everyone having to own an EV and having to drive the EV for everything is going to be hard to do
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