FWIW, I agree with that. But, while land is not scarce in the US, long distance transmission capacity is. There are definitely places where putting solar on roofs is cheaper, or at least faster and easier, than getting large amounts of utility scale solar permitted and building the transmission capacity to bring it to where the demand is.
And I don't just think agrivoltaics is cool. I think it dodges a lot of usually-bogus-but-impactful objections that so many large scale new construction projects get hit with.
Excellent comment, spells out a lot of thoughts I'd been dancing around for a while better than I had.
-- Avoid tying up capital in illiquid plans. One exception is housing since 'land on Holy Terra' still seems quite valuable in many scenarios.
This is the step I'm on. Just bought land after saving up for several years while being nomadic, planning on building a small house soon in such a way that I can quickly make myself minimally dependent on outside resources if I need to. In any AI scenario that respects property rights, this seems valuable to me.
-- Make whatever spiritual preparations you can, whatever spirituality means to you. If you are inclined to Buddhism meditate. Practice loving kindness. Go to church if you are Christian. Talk to your loved ones. Even if you are atheist you need to prepare your metaphorical spirit for what may come. Physical health may also be valuable here.
This I need to double down on. I've been more focused on trying to get others close to me on board with my expectations of impending weirdness, with moderate success.
The idea that AIs would go around killing everyone instead of just doing what we tell them to do seems like science fiction.
I've had this experience too. The part that baffles me about it is the seeming lack of awareness of the gap between "what we tell them to do" and "what we want them to do." This gap isn't sci-fi, it already exists in very clear ways (and should be very familiar to anyone who has ever written any code of any kind).
I have (non-AI-expert) colleagues that I've talked to about LLM use, where they dismiss the response to a prompt as nonsense, so I ask to see the chat logs, and I dig into it for 5 minutes. Then I inform them that actually, the LLM's answer is correct, you didn't ask what you thought you were asking, you missed an opportunity to learn something new, and also here's the three-times-as-long version of the prompt that gives enough context to actually do what you expected.
Edit to add: I'm also very much a fan of panko toasted in butter in a pan as a topping. Can be made in advance and left in a bowl next to the mac and cheese for everyone to use however much they want.
Yes, at conferences I've been to the discussion is increasingly not "How will we afford all the long term energy storage?" so much as "how much of a role will there be for long term energy storage?"
Personally I'm fairly confident that we'll eventually need at least 4-16 hrs energy storage in most places, and more in some grids, but I suspect that many places will be able to muddle and kludge their way through most multi-day storage needs with a bunch of other partial solutions that generate power or shift demand.
One of many cases where it's much easier to predict the long-term trajectory than the path to get there, and most people still don't.
I like to put the numbers in a form that less mathy folks seem to find intuitive. If you wanted to replace all of the world's current primary energy use with current solar panels, and had enough storage to make it all work, then the land area you'd need is approximately South Korea. Huge, but also not really that big. (Note: current global solar panel manufacturing capacity is enough to get us about a half to a third of the way there if we fully utilize it over the next 25 years).
In practice I think over the next handful of decades we're going to need 3-10x that much electricity, but even that doesn't really change the conclusion, just the path. But also, we can plausibly expect solar panel efficiencies and capacity factors to go up as we start moving towards better types of PV tech. For example, based on already demonstrated performance values, a 2 or 3 junction tandem bifacial perovskite solar panel (which no one currently manufactures at scale, and which seemed implausible to most people including me even two years ago) could get you close to double the current kWh/m2 we get from silicon, and the power would be spread much less unevenly throughout the day and year.
Context: right now gas peaker plants with ~10% utilization have LCOE of about 20 cents/kWh, about 3-5x most other energy sources. I think in the proposed scenario here we'd be more like 20-40% utilization, since we'd also get some use out of these systems overnight night and in winter.
If this became much more common and people had to pay such variable prices, we'd also be able to do a lot more load shifting to minimize the impact on overall energy costs (when to dry clothes and heat water, using phase change materials in HVAC, using thermal storage in industrial facilities' systems, etc.).
I agree with this reasoning.
I'd add that part of the answer is: as various other relevant technologies become cheaper, both the solar farm and nuclear plant operators (and/or their customers) are going to invest in some combination of batteries and electrolyzers (probably SOECs for nuclear to use some of the excess heat) and carbon capture equipment and other things in order to make other useful products (methanol, ammonia, fuels, other chemicals, steel, aluminum, etc.) using the excess capacity.
Personally I'm not a fan of the pasta texture of baked mac and cheese, but I've definitely sauced the cooked pasta, topped with cheese, and broiled it. That's fast, and you could spread it across multiple pans so it has more surface area. I suspect a blow torch could also work?
Reading your comment and then rereading mine, I think I've been doing a terrible job explaining myself. I am not generally in favor of central planning, and am generally in favor of permitting reform, more utility scale solar, fewer subsidies, removal of net metering, and introduction of real time electricity pricing.
What I haven't been commenting on is which things I think are going to happen whether I like it or not, which things I think would be good but only if we also remove the other distortions they currently counterbalance, and which I don't think are politically feasible regardless of what their practical impacts would be.
I think within a few years it will become clear to many farmers that agrivoltaics would be a net benefit to themselves, so long as policy doesn't stand in their way. There's a lot more buried in that caveat than I feel like going into here, though.