And, if they have enough autonomy to import Chinese panels (50% cheaper), a network of these nations can blanket the entire country with renewables.

Funding and consultation started in 2004. Expected completion date 2029. Quarter of a century to build 8km of road.

So the easiest answer is: "yes"/"all of the above"

Even as energy production prices from solar trend towards zero, end user energy costs is still going to be lower bounded by transmission costs.

California in particular is getting a nasty taste of this, with many customer's bill being mostly transmission costs. However, this is largely because they're paying for PG&E's lawsuit payouts and regulatory required upgrades.

Energy can be free, but reliable and safe transmission will likely always be expensive.

Prerequisites for manufacturing panels here at an even remotely competitive price includes reducing labor costs and extracting/refining minerals at scale.

I absolutely agree we should onshore solar production but simply onshoring manufacturing isnt the first step. Frankly im not even sure the labor cost is even solvable. Will probably always have to utilize low foreign wages

The solar panels can enable other industries locally. For example, cheap and plentiful electricity can be used to produce local stuff that costs energy.

And solar panel production is not really "strategically" important - in a kinetic war, china can withold solar panels and it would not make a difference in the war.

Therefore, there's no reason not to import cheap panels.

Most likely, you will see a lot of made in Mexico/Caribbean/Canada

That doesn't sound sustainable at all to me.

https://www.renewableenergyworld.com/solar/solarcycle-to-bui...

The nice thing about them is that they're pretty simple compared to a lot of modern electronics. More hope about recycling them than piles of old computers.

Sounds pretty circular and sustainable to me.

The quip about "cheap" was that recyclability has nothing to do with it (it would likely add cost, not remove any).

We will need to process these appropriately at their end of life and not just landfill them.

The US installed about 32 GW of solar in 2023. (1)

A modern 395W bifacial solar module (2) weighs 25.7kg; about 65g per watt.

That's about two million metric tons of solar panels to handle every year. In contrast, the US produces about 73 million metric tons of plastic waste per year. We landfill a total of about 131 million metric tons per year (3) -- and that's ignoring that things like coal tailings aren't accounted for in landfilling amounts. We produce and burn about 534 million metric tons of coal per year.

The numbers are large but the relative cost of solar panels 50 years hence is likely extremely tolerable compared to the alternatives.

(1) https://www.seia.org/news/solar-installations-2023-expected-...

(2) https://signaturesolar.com/hyundai-395w-bifacial-solar-panel...

(3) https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

Free, not exactly, but certainly affordable.

https://www.pv-magazine-australia.com/2022/04/08/andrew-forr...

For scale reference those solar farms | cattle stations are to provide power to mining operations that ship almost a billion tonnes of iron ore per annum (and remove a factor of overburden) consuming major amounts of fossil fuel in the process.

Work is also underway to upgrade trains that roll that billion tonnes to the coast down a 600m height differential to recoup energy.

See: Infinity train.

You appear to be carrying some beef about "solar power proponents" being unrealistic hippy socialists rather than multi billion dollar industrialists.

An entitled and creepy af attitude, if there ever was one.

"Foreign" "wages" are not going to stay low forever.

Already gone up and going up in some countries.

Think (and act) smarter, dude.

Only the fittest of the fittest shall survive.

- Bob Marley (Could you be loved)

https://youtu.be/CRkfqH1r714?si=8FsPUVBnizwkixvB

This mindset lies at the center of neoliberalism and should be examined with nuance and perspective, since the quality of each individual's experience can vary wildly in a market which accepts such inequalities as necessary for the health of the overall system.

Possibly not, but that can't be solved purely by employers. If a country for whatever reason does not have the economy to support this, this can't be solved quickly. Companies won't pay $15/hr to overseas workers; they'd probably just not spend the money there at all. That's the choice you're giving them.

Also - it probably will be cheaper, for three reasons:

- the local market won't bear the real price, and while this means less profit, it's still some profit, or presence, or whatever reason the vendor is selling for

- a similar but slightly different product might be offered. E.g. I bought a car in South Africa and it was a slightly simpler spec compared to the UK equivalent, despite looking identical

- local labour, fuel tax, sales tax, and other costs all increase prices. Driving the goods to a shop and buying them from it is a pretty different cost in different countries.

Im not sure I understand what you’re saying because it absolutely is orders of magnitude to import phones and laptops. Cars have more tariffs to protect the domestic market so Im unsure about that one.

Policy makers on the other hand should consider externalities, and optimize for making them less bad, or at least not make them worse.

Should we pay everyone the same in a given country? Should a food deliverer make the same as a surgeon? No? Then this creates an economic hierarchy already. This economic hierarchy exists for countries as well.

Though, notably, the experience between someone in Mississippi and New York City is already wildly different.

That’s a surprisingly vague statement on a billion dollar project. I’d expect there would be spreadsheets and models estimating production/consumption locations for decades out and the company would be quoting a percentage figure even if that was a guesstimate.

Edit: 3.58B, not 12 from another comment. Still, pretty large investment for Philippines.

So 35% of the Ute Nation's GDP vs 1.3% of the Phillipines. OP is clearly either uninformed or biased. Or just doesn't understand Tribal Sovereignty status in the US.

[1] One feels that 30 life for something where components can be constantly replaced as they wear out is a misnomer.

Additionally, the Ute will need to weather that impact for a full 30 years, while the Filipinos will only need to for a few.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edifice_complex

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhadla_Solar_Park?wprov=sfti1#...

Assuming 4 trillion kWh. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/use-of-elect....

edit: Oh, and that $6.8 billion looks optimistic. This project with two AP1000s looks like it costs $30 billion. https://www.ans.org/news/article-3949/vogtle-project-update-...

So even if you discount the capacity by a 25% capacity factor, and use the lower cost per reactor that I originally quoted, this is still cheaper than nuclear. And that's just the up-front investment. Operating costs are much cheaper for solar as well, the majority of the cost is in the initial build.

Given that transmission isn't free, there are areas of the country where solar has a lower capacity factor than this, and solar and wind take more land, there are still cases where nuclear may be a better investment. I'm just pointing out that there are plenty of simple, economic reasons why solar and wind are growing at a much faster rate than nuclear; it's cheaper overall, it requires less up-front capital, etc. Nuclear is likely to fill niches for a long time, but investment in nuclear is not going to be the major way to decarbonize.

The only real drawback to building solar power in a desert is sand storms. That means the capacity factor is less relevant but life span and repair costs is a different matter. It is a bit similar to ocean wind farms. The capacity naturally goes up, but the salt water and transportation (as well as increased risks to engineers) makes life span and repair a bit more of an issue (it should be noted that most ocean based wind farms tend to use shallows and nature reserves near large cities).

But again, this project is built in a desert. The very definition of a place with consistent amount of sun. I hope the project works out.

I want the Utes to have success in this, but I don’t want the general attitude to be “trash the desert because there is sun there”.

It might be worthwhile to exclude certain areas of particularly rare variations of the ecosystem to be built in. But it's easy to end up with too much red tape that will be abused for NIMBY and by people who hide a fossil yolo attitude behind a facade of conservationism.

Perhaps there could be some mechanism for operating some veto quota, "pick the project you want most desperately to be stopped"? That scheme would probably end getting gamed in the ugliest ways, with sacrificial decoy projects getting proposed, not vetoed and then getting built to keep up appearances. Better not, heh.

An that's before even mentioning the other thing. Would you be interested in talking about uranium mines? Oh, not the other thing you expected?

Yes, nuclear is getting buried on price, but you make out the total cost of solar much lower and much more certain than it is in reality. Nobody really knows how much will renewables end up costing when they start to make up the majority of production.

https://www.csiro.au/en/news/all/articles/2023/october/genco...

> Even with this extra VRE cost in 2030, the answer to whether renewables are the cheapest form of energy is still yes. And it remains so when VRE is at 90 percent of the energy system

Look, you're treating the current LCOE numbers and making the (mistaken or disingenuous) implication that solar/wind won't fall EVEN FURTHER, but they almost certainly will.

With solar, there is perovskites and many other avenues of improvement in the core technology. Both wind and solar will still drop in price from increased economies of scale. And battery storage is going to plummet with sodium ion in the near term, and hopefuly sodium-sulfur techs in the future in addition to whatever grid-specific use cases are developed.

So it's true! Nobody know how much renewables will cost... or HOW LITTLE they will cost... in the long run.

Existing already-built nuclear is woefully noncompetitive, but I'll take it for grid levelling over gas turbine and (ugh) coal, so keep the lights on.

But NEW nuclear? What price are you targeting? I would guess in the timespan of a new nuke plant construction (10 years), solar will drop by 50%-60% in costs (inflation adjusted), and I think wind still has 33% drops coming. I mean, how does a sensible person approve a nuclear project with this degree of uncertainty/evolution/revolution in power costs?

And if you want to talk uncertainty in cost of electricity, the unreliable final construction and operation costs of nuclear are much more unreliable from that standpoint.

Believable models of achieving that goal call for setting up capacity markets where traditional suppliers are paid to not emit, and stand by to intervene when required by weather conditions, achieving close to net zero year round emissions (¹. Nobody really knows how this will end up costing because no such grid exists today.

Grid scale battery storage is still very far from competing with traditional baseload production, even when supplied with free renewables. Sodium has been the next big thing for the last decade, but its only deployments are in the experimental, MWh range. It's still far from a mature, proven technology, let alone one that can disrupt lithium in the gridscale storage space.

Perhaps you are handwaving substantial technical and economic details away and making too bold claims insufficiently supported by data. Not unlike the nuclear fanboys who are seeing thorium fast breeders just around every corner.

(¹ Btw, this is just another nail in the nuclear coffin - coal too - because they can't play nice with a fast moving grid.

A lot of the nuclear risk is already included in that cost; we have fairly robust nuclear regulation and safety engineering these days. I have pretty high confidence in the safety of modern nuclear reactors, because there has been the engineering needed to ensure it, and there's fairly strong regulatory oversight. Of course, that all gets factored into the price tag, which is part of why the price tag for nuclear is so high.

I'm just saying that I see a lot of discussion of more nuclear investment as the solution to decarbonization, but it's hard to make the economics work out; nuclear has gotten more expensive over time, while renewables have been dropping in price dramatically.

I'm sure there is some room for nuclear in the market, but it's hard to see it providing more than a fraction of what renewables do, just due to the massive cost difference.

Plz bro, just 10 more years and the next design will finally solve all the probs.

I don’t like solutions that don’t ever make real progress. Solar is getting cheaper in real-time, as are batteries. Nuclear is getting comparatively more expensive every year.

Nuclear will continue to be viable in denser areas, with lower solar resources, and when you want to get a lot of production closer to large population.

There's a reason there are so many nuclear plants in the Northeast Corridor (Boston to Washington area), and so many fewer in the southwest, and I imagine that this trend will continue.

This might still make solar cheaper but difference will be smaller than headline numbers.

The basic point is that nuclear is just really, really expensive, and it has been getting more expensive over time, while solar and wind have been getting cheaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levelized_cost_of_electricity

No, that is a red herring. That exact comparison would be only for greenfield projects disconnected from everything else. When connecting to an existing network, the existing (and future) generation on it is also important. For instance, if the network already has a high enough amount of gas generation, 10MW of solar or 10MW of nuclear would reduce the use of fossil fuel by the same amount; the same applies to reducing the use of water stored in hydroelectric dams.

And remember, nuclear generally needs some form of storage or supplementation with on-demand generation (generally via fossil fuels). Nuclear reactors are very slow to increase or decrease their output; they're best providing a constant base power output, but to account for periodic changes in demand across the day, you need either grid-scale storage or to supplement them with things like gas turbines that can quickly spin up and down. Many of our existing grid-scale energy storage systems are there to support nuclear. For example: https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/12/02/northfield-mountain-hyd...

But if you're already going to be building the grid-scale storage, supplying it with renewable energy can be a lot cheaper than supplying it with nuclear.

I'm not saying that nuclear will have no place in the energy grid as we decarbonize. But the economics are hard to justify as renewables and storage become cheaper.

There are probably studies that have done an analysis of this kind for the entire U.S. and calculated various scenarios. I know that these have been done for Germany and other European countries. A 100% renewable system usually comes out cheaper than including nuclear in the mix to any large extend (though Germany has no remaining old reactors which could get their lifetime enhanced relatively cheaply).

You don't get to say "oh well it'll be 1GW of solar if we also build 1GW of wind" because that's not the project.

This is all an excuse to talk around Solar's god awful capacity factors which take the shine off those $/MW headlines.

Plus, when the hydro storage fails and floods a town, that’s still pretty bad.

Somewhere like Kansas, wind power and battery based storage may be more effective.

Here's a map of pumped storage hydro potential; note how dense the potential is throughout most of the Western US. https://maps.nrel.gov/psh

Depending on how you measure, lots of states are flatter than Kansas. Florida is the flattest state by nearly all measures. Illinois is crazy flat as well.

I don't like it. I do like renewable power, but this kind of puffery makes people think that we're right on the verge of building an all-renewable electrical grid. Which we are not.

We could have a zero-emissions electrical grid in ten years, by embracing a nuclear baseline, putting in a bunch of solar and wind where it makes sense, and adding some battery storage to soak up the intermittency of the latter. But when people read solar by the nameplate, they think it's 7x cheaper than it is, and try to compare that number to nuclear, rather than the actual one.

https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/la-plata-electric-put...

Incentivize home energy storage and invest in grid level energy storage and encourage purchasing EVs that can be used as grid batteries? Nope.

Invest in better grid-level interconnects to export electricity? Nope.

Work with the community to attract industry that uses lots of electricity and approach commercial/industrial users to find ways to decarbonize? Nope.

Ban customers from new grid-intertied solar: YES.

Engage in scare-mongering about solar causing fires and being dangerous or causing grid instability when grid-intertie systems have a slew of safety mechanisms? YES.

Absolute morons.

Also buried in that article: they signed a contract with their wholesale provider mandating that they can only generate 5% of their own electricity. The article claims, but does not explain, how this doesn't limit solar generation - there's a bunch of hand-waiving about how "it doesn't prohibit homeowners from generating solar power."

That contract goes until 2050. Who looked at the electricity market and said "you know what? Let's sign a multi-decade contract, that seems smart!"?

Many incumbents will try their best to prevent it, and to be fair it's not entirely for malicious reasons. Energy taxes and income from power plants pay for a lot of community value. The income has to be replaced somehow if it is removed.

I think that solar + various storage options are technically already the best solution for energy supply, and this kind of political inertia is the main obstacle to overcome in order to make it a reality.

It's a PBS special about the history of the Boston subway (which was one of the first in the nation).

To give you an idea of what construction safety was like back then, they would routinely encounter gas lines, cut them WITHOUT turning off the gas, and keep working.

Obviously, this led to lots of explosions but also very quick construction. If you are optimizing for speed over safety/environmental/etc it's pretty surprising how quickly you can build something.

Near where I live is a bridge over a river that needs replacing. The county had to study three different ways to do it, weighing environmental impact, traffic disruption, total cost of each option, and so forth.

The planning and regulatory portion of the project is easily 75% of the timeline, and that's for a fast one due to the condition of the bridge itself. If it were less urgent, it would have likely taken even longer.

Right next door to that bridge are three other projects: a cliff/dirt collapse/erosion/retaining project that kept the river parkway closed for like 4 years, and two bridges being reconditioned that have been closed for 3. Those went through the "normal" channels.

I think a part of the difference is that the federal government provides funds for maintenance of the interstates, and the sheer volume of traffic that was being re-routed down other roads that weren't really intended for the extra traffic (adding lanes to 94 certainly helped some).

Shame that it requires a catastrophe to see what we can really do when it needs doing.

That's still done today, evidently! A few months back, there was a small gas leak in my neighborhood. When they knocked on my door to say they'd be working in the area, the repair crew leader was kind enough to indulge my questions.

I asked them if my gas would be shut off. They said no, they do the work while the gas is still on!

And they must have been cutting into the gas line because they replaced a section that ran under the street. They used a backhoe to dig huge holes on both sides of the street and then fed a flexible pipe through.

Here's a video about something kind of similar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCMs__ZnOfA

I'm sure today's techniques are different and much safer, so I don't think it negates your point that they used to do risky stuff.

My understanding is that most "last mile" gas lines are pretty low pressure and low flow. On purpose, so that if theirs a leak they aren't releasing massive amounts of gas into the atmosphere in a hurry, so the concentration doesn't raise to dangerous levels.

Then when they are working on the lines and in those pits to make connections, they have detectors to tell if there's a dangerous build up, and ventilation to ensure it doesn't happen anyway.

The system generally being low pressure is why sometimes during really cold periods when demand is high, the gas company has to adjust field regulators to increase flow so that demand can be met. They normally run at low enough flow that if everyone's furnace and stove and water heater all run at once, the lines would effectively run out of gas.

we now build projects to relocate utilities (so that you don't have to shut down a subway line to replace an adjacent water pipe) but that stuff is costly and everyone is prepared to sue the other in case of a mess-up. but there is a lot of the physical version of tech debt; New York is still replacing wood and lead piping, for example.

Each crew had field archaeologists and biologists and representatives from the tribes and Bureau of Land Management working closely with us to insure that we followed all procedures to protect sensitive areas from disturbance.

That meant in practice that local or BLM archaeologists and biologists led the way across the area where we intended to acquire data. Just as you see in the photos in the linked presentation (user 1970-01-01), teams of experts surveyed the land looking for sensitive or threatened plants and animals and archaeologists identified areas with cultural artifacts. These areas were flagged and that flagging placed them off limits to our operations. They were No-Go areas. We had permission to operate within a fairly narrow easement across the landscape with strict guidelines about vehicle access, allowable damage to existing vegetation and the landscape, trash removal, etc since that region is very arid and small things like orange peels become items that are recognizable centuries after they are discarded.

For this survey I expect that they staked the potential affected area and walked every bit of it using pin flags to mark things that are not to be disturbed. The area is only about 8 square miles so it shouldn't take that long.

In case of a chip factory currently developed by Intel in Germany, they went out onto the 200ha (roughly 280 football fields) and found and resettled 7 rare hamsters. 2 of those had to be dug out: https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/sachsen-anhalt/magdeburg/magd...

"The last hamster of the fields gave a timid crow when Alexander Resetaritz drew it out of the construction on his paw and pushed it into the transport box."

I wouldn't underestimate how effective experienced and qualified humans can be in finding and interpreting signs of the presence of a small number of specific species in a large area. Drones and AI will probably get there at some point, but I doubt that its close.

Hopefully they can attract further industry, that will consume that cheap energy close to production. Metal smelting ones for example.

https://massena-environmental-health-and-justice.org/superfu...

> Alcoa released hazardous substances, including polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), onto the facility property as well as into the Grasse River through four industrial outfalls

I wonder for what you need PCBs in sufficient quantities to cause a superfund site.

Reading the slides from the biological/archaeological impact studies from Canigou Group shows that someone didn't proofread their slide.

The burrowing owl study states that it is "Threatened with the State of Colorado but not Federally".

It was probably supposed to say "Threatened within..."

Good luck to the Utes. There is not much industry other than oil and gas exploration in that region unless recent interest in nuclear power generation has restarted local mining operations shut down in the 1970's that used to be large employers (and polluters) out there.

EDIT: Following the link posted by another comment shows that the slide in this article has been corrected. The same slide on that link says "in" instead of "with".

As long as they properly distribute the profits to tribe members. There have definitely been some boondoggles in the past that only help the 1% ers

Electing tribal leaders who will focus on improvements that spread the wealth and boost living standards can be as difficult for them as it is for other Americans to elect leaders who attempt to improve their constituent's lives and create opportunities for them.

It is also a challenge, less so today than in the past, to find tribal members with the domain knowledge to be able to understand how all this can be put to best use for the benefit of all.

Then you also need firewalls in place to prevent exploitation by multinational corporations with the domain expertise who use that to draft agreements that end up cheating the tribes out of profits that should go to the tribes.

It's a hard problem since it is so endemic in the American business world and since many programs that are currently in place have no one conducting effective oversight to insure that business is conducted transparently and to the benefit of the ones owning the resources.

Those who should be regulated end up writing the regulations that govern their activities and so they do this in a manner that offers the least friction to their operations at the lowest cost to them.

It is definitely not just a tribal problem here in the US. It is endemic in the corporate world and in government. That's why I mentioned that part at the end of that post.

If you don’t eat your vegetables I’m sending you to live with your uncle Phil, in Colorado.

> Annual capacity is estimated to be about 756 megawatts.

756 MW/year = ~2 MW/day = less than 1 watt per day per panel?

I get that the sun doesn't shine 24/7, but even so that seems way off. What am I missing? Maybe the 756 MW figure is daily instead of annual?

971MW, producing up to 1700 to 2400 GWh/year.

That puts it at 2471 hours/year of full-power production equivalent, or 28%. That's good - it's a nice area for solar.

(1)- https://www.utilitydive.com/news/solar-wind-renewable-energy...

“756MW of annual capacity” doesn’t make sense, given that MW is a measure of instantaneous power. They might mean that the average daily peak output over the whole year is 756MW?

I'm pretty sure this tribe has a casino on their reservation, but I know the one in Utah doesn't, both get money from oil extraction, but I'm not sure if they are totally independent from each other?

But then again, those data centers could have bitcoin miners, at which point, we'd be back to the casino. =)

https://www.canigougroup.com/news/evaluation-of-green-hydrog...

Methanol is another valuable endpoint, the Chinese version of this (CEEC Songyuan) is using the same approach but intends to make both ammonia and methanol.

Utah is already a power exporter. Utah generates about one-fifth more electricity than it consumes, and the state is a net supplier of power to other states.[1]

[1] https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=UT

Transmission is expensive; you'd rather sell locally. Before you finance a $1B project it would be good to have a sense of how you expect to sell the outputs!

Part of what made this project viable IMHO was the adjacency to existing WECC Interface Paths.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WECC_Intertie_Paths#/media/Fil...

Right now we get past a lot of that by bundling up coal and natural gas in trains and pipes and generating closer to the sink.

https://energypeople.com/news/story/green-returns-for-green-...

They also state that they're interested in developing hydrogen and ammonia production capability using the electricity produced, rather than selling it to the grid, but building such production facilities would increase up-front costs by several billion.

yep, they’ll waste the energy trying to transmit it

sounds like they’re going to be attracting bitcoin miners. they’re the only use case that’s able to be in the middle of nowhere without needing other infrastructure, like robust internet.

any other use cases you all know of?

High voltage transmission lines are very efficient. On the order of 1-2% loses per 100 miles for 500 kV carrying 1000 MW [0].

[0] https://web.ecs.baylor.edu/faculty/grady/_13_EE392J_2_Spring...

But you also need/want robust power delivery to run a datacenter, and a single local solar project isn't robust power delivery. If you had robust power delivery, those transmission lines could be used to export the solar, and it wouldn't make sense to put a datacenter there anymore.

> “We, as the Ute Mountain Ute tribe, had been a fossil fuel tribe with oil and gas for a long time, probably over 50 years. Today, with the changes in legislation, global warming, and climate change, you can see the impact of what's happening to our world.

I think I only ever heard tribe used to describe a group or maybe 10-30 hunter-gatherers, or perhaps the descendants of such a group, but this is clearly not that. It sounds more like it might be a municipality with jurisdiction over some city+-sized plot of land? Or is it like a church type of structure where anyone in the area can sign up to be a member? Or something completely different?

I've tried looking up tribe but the definition I get is this

> A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.

That doesn't sound like the type of structure to have a billion USD to invest. There's three definitions given but none of them fit the context here

And a FAQ: https://www.bia.gov/frequently-asked-questions

The land they directly control can be anywhere from tiny to gigantic, depending on the particulars: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/Indian_L...

Many people also live in surrounding areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_reservations_in...

Much of the time the tribes have their own small governments, similar to municipal services, but also often with their own equivalents to "courts", "police", etc., who may utilize different corrective measures than the US ones. Often they will have an agreement with surrounding law enforcement (or the federal government) to partner up on certain categories of infractions, such as traffic violations or murders.

Some tribes have some money thanks to casinos and other business activities, but most are unfortunately quite poor, and many of their communities must work very hard to survive.

(This all is just my layman's understanding. I am not Native American, but I've lived near their communities. Please correct me if I'm wrong!)

---------

Edit: The 2023 movie Killers of the Flower Moon is really worth watching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killers_of_the_Flower_Moon_(fi...

You will run into confusing situations where a county law enforcement official might patrol on a reservation because there is overlap or nebulous boundaries with the blessing (cross deputizarion) from the tribal law enforcement. However some tribes defer more of their governance to a Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs.

For a largely autonomous example, the Cherokee in North Carolina are interesting. Largely funded by their casinos and now marijuana which is legal on their reservation but not the encompassing state of North Carolina. They have fairly strict rules around membership, such that a Cherokee that was shipped off to Oklahoma is not eligible for membership. Land ownership is based on tribal membership, not quite following standard American rules. It’s a fun deep dive to read up on their system.

The Ute Mountain Ute Tribe referenced in the article is one such Federally recognized tribe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribe_(Native_American) https://www.bia.gov/service/tribal-leaders-directory

Each tribe is free to determine its own legal structure, as it is a separate polity (a sovereign nation) from the US -- sort of. US federal law still applies on federal reservations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United...

But it's certainly nothing like the primitive society you are imagining, and that's partly why I think a lot of American Indian nations don't use that word to describe themselves.

For example, the "Seneca tribe" calls themselves the Seneca Nation. That is, they were and are a group of people sharing common ethnicity, culture, language, and some kind of governmental organization across their territory, which at one point covered a large portion of what is now western New York state. They lived in towns with palisade walls and farmed several crops. They interacted with other nations in a complicated geopolitical system involving trade, alliance, and war. It's a far cry from the image of dumb savages in crude huts.

In the USA today, American Indian nations are essentially sovereign nations, and have some of their own territory in areas called reservations. So that's what we are talking about here: the actions of a sovereign nation, with its own government and geographical territory.

B) its more like what would be referred to as a "semi autonomous region" in other countries. They have their own governments, police forces, etc.

C) they probably secured some sort of outside investments, these native american reservations are by no means unsophisticated. Other reservations have been able to bring in revenue by using their autonomy to establish casinos and resorts on their lands, even in states where that would be illegal outside of the reservations (because the reservation's autonomy means that they aren't necessarily bound by the laws of whatever state they are in).

> Because the Constitution vested the Legislative Branch with plenary power over Indian Affairs, states have no authority over tribal governments unless expressly authorized by Congress. While federally recognized tribes generally are not subordinate to states, they can have a government-to-government relationship with these other sovereigns, as well.

> Furthermore, federally recognized tribes possess both the right and the authority to regulate activities on their lands independently from state government control. They can enact and enforce stricter or more lenient laws and regulations than those of the surrounding or neighboring state(s) wherein they are located. Yet, tribes frequently collaborate and cooperate with states through compacts or other agreements on matters of mutual concern such as environmental protection and law enforcement.

From https://www.bia.gov/frequently-asked-questions

Unfortunately, this is just a continuation of the numerous betrayals the US and military units have inflicted on them for the past centuries. Our government and soldiers routinely violated the treaties we signed and forcibly relocated and murdered many people.

Many tribes did not retain their federal recognition and just kinda exist in a no-man's land between states and the federal government, lacking much of the autonomy of the federally recognized tribes.

I seem to remember being taught in school that the native american reservations exist because of treaties signed by the united states government with sovereign nations (those nations being the native americans) and that the US government is obligated to respect their autonomy and sovereignty by the terms laid out in those treaties.

i don't mean to contradict your claims that the Federal Government has a long history of violating these treaties, as that is undoubtedly true. i'm just curious because the way i interpreted your description makes it seem as if they're only autonomous because the federal government has chosen to recognize them.

Through centuries of conquest and betrayal, the US governments have eroded much of the tribes' previous power, and these days they exist under a complex legal framework in which they have some sovereignty and some autonomy, but not to the same degree that, say, Canada or China have. Their rights under US law are granted by (and can be revoked by) acts of Congress. Lacking their own militaries and international diplomacy, they are more like states than countries as we think of them.

But it's actually way more complicated than that and depends on whether the tribe is federally recognized, what specific rights Congress withheld from them, whether they are prosecuting tribesmembers, other Indians, or non-Indian Americans, etc.

At the end of the day, it unfortunately comes down to who has the bigger stick. Tribes can say no all they want but it's up to the US Congress to listen or not. And they don't necessarily have the same Constitutional protections that US states have, either. It just really depends. And again, I'm not an expert at all!

This page has more detail: https://www.uaf.edu/tribal/academics/112/unit-4/generalprinc...

But you're totally right, the name itself doesn't mean much.

A lot of bitcoin miners use stranded power, which would otherwise go to waste. People often respond to me on HN that the power could be easily/cheaply sent elsewhere for better uses [0]. Comments like this just re-enforce the fact that these people have literally no idea what they are talking about. Thanks, I'll favorite this one. =)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39317583

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

(We detached this offtopic subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39411064.)

Often claimed, rarely supported by evidence or numbers.

It's also unlikely to be very practical, because that'd essentially mean running bitcoin miners in load-balancing mode, and not running them most of the time. Given that bitcoin hardware tends to loose value quickly, as the next generation of mining hardware comes to the market, this is unlikely to be a feasible model.

Update: I got downvoted for not posting them. I did in the link above though.

https://www.coinmint.one/ is the data center. They have about 500MW of power going to them from the Moses-Saunders dam.

They don't need to shut down cause it is hydro and 24/7. They actually help keep the dam running cause they balance the load coming from it. Just like the aluminum smelter before it did. The location of the facility and dam are near the border of Canada and the US. It is very remote and in the middle of nowhere with enough population to consume the 500MW. There are main grid lines going past them, but it would likely need new infrastructure to connect to it at that much power.

I've seen their power costs (including transmission), I can't post that, obviously. But, a large chunk of their costs, is transmission, which pays for the install and maintenance of the lines running the few miles from the dam. These are large / tall physical towers.

Disclosure: I'm a former very large scale bitcoin/litecoin/ethereum miner and now building an AI bare metal gpu service.

Even if the argument is that compute heavy data centers are the only use-case that makes sense, there's lots of compute use cases other than bitcoin. And obviously the former presence of the aluminum shelter suggests data centers are not the only good use-cases. I understand the appeal of the argument that bitcoin mining has less energy impact than people think because it can uniquely take advantage of weird edge cases, but it doesn't make sense to me.

The fact that the smelter shut down and literally nobody picked it up and put it to use, speaks volumes. Heck, Alcoa was so desperate to unload it, they let those "dirty" bitcoin miners move in, over any other business potential.

Here is another one... the Quincy/Wenatchee area of WA state. Also sparsely populated, but more hydro power than anyone knows what to do with. This is where a huge number of data centers are, including bitcoin miners.

When people say that the power "could" be sent elsewhere, they are right, you just need to build the damn transmission lines. It's not rocket science.

The reality of the situation is that certainly a lot of stuff "could" happen, like Fusion and Nuclear power too.

My point is that whataboutism, is probably a bad take here.

A lot of bitcoin miners are keeping fossil fuel spewing power plants from being retired because the regulations that keep power affordable for Americans haven’t caught up. There’s a reason China killed bitcoin mining and the US needs to follow suit. Literally killing the planet for imaginary coins that don’t solve any problems that weren’t already solved. Well, besides the whole anonymous ransom thing.

According to this data, China tried, but failed to kill bitcoin mining. As of the last update in Jan 2022, China currently has 55% of the hashrate it had before the ban. https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/mining_map

Also, mining is a global industry. Banning it in one country is like grabbing a fist full of water. It just oozes out elsewhere. It looks like the China ban mostly oozed into the US and Kazakhstan, before rebounding back into China. The effective reduced total energy use from the China ban barely lasted 6 months before it surpassed previous levels.

This was the result of one of the strongest authoritarian surveillance states in the world. What makes you think anyone else can do better?

Oh and I'm more of a fan of Ethereum. They've now moved to PoS, which consumes a fraction of the power, and there is actual utility on that chain. Moved my bitcoin to wbtc too, but looking forward to more decentralized versions of it eventually.

That money came straight from Texas citizens who gain nothing from the operations of these coin miners and who have already had to pay for the near collapse of the power grid back in Feb. 2021 which occurred because utilities are largely unregulated and can ignore requirements that they upgrade facilities or worse, just whine about the costs of bringing power generation plants into compliance with modern air quality standards like a bunch of rich spoiled toddlers. Many of these plants were grandfathered in when standards were established even though they would have been easy to upgrade at the time.

It is about time that the feds do what the Chinese did a few years ago and take a hard look at all the energy waste in shitcoin mining. [2]

In addition to energy consumption, this facility in Granbury, TX is already under fire for being a huge noise nuisance from the cooling fans that operate 24/7. [3]

[0] https://theweek.com/in-depth/1022698/how-voracious-bitcoin-m...

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bitcoin-mining-cryptocurrency-r...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/large-cryptocurr...

[3] https://time.com/6590155/bitcoin-mining-noise-texas/

I understand from your replies that you had a personal stake in shitcoin mining and you're pivoting to something else. Maybe for you the handwriting is on the wall.

> I understand from your replies that you had a personal stake in shitcoin mining and you're pivoting to something else. Maybe for you the handwriting is on the wall.

This feels like a personal attack, which as I understand it, is against the guidelines. But, to explain... I worked for businesses with stakes. I didn't have it myself. That would be like blaming someone who works for SpaceX, for Elon's bad takes.

As far as the Texas political situation goes, I do what I can. I'm only one vote and experience has demonstrated that when you contact one of your elected reps here, the best that you can hope for is that they forget to add your contact information to their list of Texas residents who might support the election or re-election of people just like them. I made the mistake once of correcting one of my reps during a community phone roundtable discussion and later followed up with an email. Since then I have been trying (with some success) to remove my contact info from their call and email lists. The simple fact that they spam your contact accounts from every state-wide and national candidate in spite of the fact that they should know that they will never have your support tells me that they are trying to discourage people who will vote against them from participating in the process. It won't work with me but it might with others.

This is as far off of the topic of solar panels in the Four Corners region as I think I need to go today. Good luck in your new ventures.

Ethereum switched from PoW to PoS. GPU mining stopped. The company I was working for wound down. So, yea... way ahead of you.

Bitcoin is about to halve its emissions. I expect a lot of miners to shut down (or at least continue to concentrate into the larger corporations).

Comedy must be your true calling.