That’s interesting. For me, I guess it’s a “grass is greener” scenario. I look at the headway various countries in the eurozone have made on topics from socialized medicine, to universal basic income, to free postsecondary education, to the protection of personal data, and even to forcing Apple to change its charging cable to the standard USB-C. That change of policy forced them to change it here, as well. The EU’s stodginess helps people even beyond its borders. My students ALL have iPhones, and It’s unbelievable to witness the ease with which they can access their devices now, vs. when they were all forced to use a specialized cable for connection and charge. America hasn’t even figured out high-speed rail yet. As an american who teaches secondary science to a bunch of naturalized citizens under the age of 18, I don’t think I can stay through the next 4 years. I fear the pogroms, if not for myself, then for my students and their families. I can’t have my tax dollars go towards a repeat of the mistakes of 90 years ago. I’m thinking New Zealand is looking comparatively nice (though apparently there’s a growing nationalist movement there as well).

In general, I do sense that there is a significantly greater sense of “rugged individualism” in the US, compared to many other countries, but I see the costs of that individualism more acutely because of its proximity. People seem to be largely incapable of consideration here, from anti-vaxx and anti-mask movements to the hesitance to tax the wealthiest individuals due to the thought that “maybe that’ll be me one day”. It’s really quite distressing.

And hey, you know what, that’s almost got a point. Firstly, I’m in the US, and I’ll freely admit that my comment was highly US-normative. However, I believe my comment on government corruption stands for the US case, where there is an insane amount of space that is already partly-developed in random bits of desert.

Now, let’s get into your claims against the Netherlands case. Let’s do some “basic maths”:

1. Unless the IEA is very, VERY wrong, your claim that the Netherlands consumes “2600 petajoule per day” is INSANELY high. Every statistic I can find shows electricity consumption being between 113 [2] and 121 [1] Terawatt-hours per annum. Let’s divide that larger value by 365 (assuming uniform seasonal demand), then convert that into joules, and we get 1.19 Petajoules per day. more than a THOUSAND times smaller than your number.
2. Secondly, this “just 1 small country” bit is spurious, since your “small country” is the 33rd-greatest electricity consumer in the world for the 77th highest population [2]
3. The assumption that you must store an entire day’s worth of energy demand is ludicrous. Let’s be generous and assume that you have to store 50% of the day’s energy demand, despite the fact that the off-hours are during the night, when electricity demands fall off.
4. Next, let us point out that we don’t need to abandon literally every other method of energy generation. From wind energy to, yes, nuclear, the Netherlands is doing quite well for itself outside of solar. Let’s assume that we need to cover all of the electricity that is currently produced using coal, oil and natural gas. All other sources already have infrastructure supporting them, including the pre-existing solar. This amount comes to about 48% [1], so let’s assume 50%.
5. Now, we need to cover 50% of 50% of 1.9 petajoules at any one time, or 475 gigajoules, at any one time.
6. Because I neither want nor need your supposedly-charitable assumptions, let’s use the actual numbers from ARES in Nevada:

• Their facility’s mass cars total 75000 tons in freedom units, or about 68040000 kg. [3]
• They claim 90+% efficiency round-trip [4], but let’s assume that your condescending tone has made the train cars sad, so they’re having a bad day, and only run at 80% efficiency, despite the fact that we’ve known how to convert to and from GPE with insane efficiency ever since Huygens invented the fucking pendulum clock.

7. Now, is this perfect for everywhere? Of course not. Not everywhere has the open space necessary. The ARES site requires a straight shot about 5 miles long, but they managed to find one that, in that distance, drops 2000 feet (~610 m) [5]
8. Now, let’s do the math together: 475000000000J / 10m/s^2 / 68040000kg / 80% Efficiency = 880m total elevation needed
9. Thus, unless my math is quite off, we would only need 2 of the little proof-of-concept ARES stations running at 80% efficiency to more than cover the energy storage needs required for your country to completely divest from fossil fuels and go all-in on solar for the remainder of your needs.

Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

[1] https://www.iea.org/countries/the-netherlands [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electricity_consumption [3] https://aresnorthamerica.com/nevada-project/ [4] https://aresnorthamerica.com/gravityline/ [5] https://energy.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/energynvgov/content/Programs/4 - ARES.pdf

ETA: rectify a quote (“just 1 small country”), and make it more civil in response to the prior commenter removing some of their more condescending language.

Again, a fair point. Assuming that anyone with an idea of the meaning of “potential energy” survives the next ten years, I’d still like to see it more fully explored in the american west, but it is, unfortunately, rather a moot point for at least five years.

I agree with you on the linearity issue. I just feel like using its size as a criticism is invalid, given that the very source you cited pointed out that the reason it’s so small is because they chose to reuse an already-disturbed site, rather than building it on 100 acres of BLM land, which I’d argue is quite admirable. The colocation point is also fair, though our water resources in the entire american west are severely limited, and will become moreso over the next 50 years. Utah’s declining snowpack and the overdrawn Colorado can only cover so much. I feel like, while the GPE law is linear for both mass and height, the fact that we can scale both is a point in favor of both pumped hydro and rail storage, and rail storage can be stored virtually indefinitely, as long as it doesn’t have time to rust in place. Being able to supplement the off-hours is absolutely doable with rail.

A fair point, but given how the best places to build solar infrastructure tend to not have easily accessible large volumes of water, I should think that economies of scale can apply if we were to put actual investment into scaling up the gravitational potential. Sure, it’s not a geometric law like for kinetic energy, but greater height and greater mass are both trivial quantities to scale in places with large empty areas. I’m simply pointing out that we’ve never invested in that obvious possibility as a civilization. Am I missing something obvious that makes the scaling non-viable?

I feel like we’re missing the part about “push carts up a hill”, which involves virtually no serious engineering difficulties aside from “which hill” and “let’s make sure the tracks run smoothly”. See: the ARES project in Nevada

Let’s be clear, the only reason grid-level storage for renewables “doesn’t exist” is because of a lack of education about (and especially commitment to) simple, reliable, non-battery energy storage such as gravitational potential, like the ARES project. We’ve been using gravitational potential storage to power our mechanisms since Huygens invented the freaking pendulum clock. There is simply no excuse other than corruption for the fact that we don’t just run a couple trains up a hill when we need to store massive amounts of solar energy.

Yeah, the only reason I replied was because you were responding to the calcium dude above, then said “s-block”. Just wanted to spread the good word of the 9th-most abundant element in the universe 🙏

Magnesium is fine (see response above). https://invidious.darkness.services/watch?v=Q_4I30Nz_b0 Just don’t vomit on it before you lick it, 'cause it’ll get spicy with acid.

I have elemental magnesium (4 ~50g ingots, I keep it in my library in a barely-sealed ziplock). it’s shelf stable and doesn’t react violently with water. Want me to try licking it and let you know? (hint: at worst it’ll make a minuscule amount of milk of magnesia)

ETA: Would I stick my tongue in pyrophoric magnesium powder? No, and you wouldn’t do that with pyrophoric aluminum or zinc powders, either, but that doesn’t stop me from using (or licking) alumnum foil. Proof: https://invidious.darkness.services/watch?v=Q_4I30Nz_b0