The fact that Night City is solar powered is really interesting. If you play the game, the solar panels are visible from afar from many vantage points across the city. And if you visit it, it takes forever to traverse. It’s pre-sense is huge.
What’s so interesting to me is that in spite of the city’s green infrastructure, the inequities persist.
Because to some extent we still have won some fights. Right now, even a cyberpunk setting is not realistic to imagine that we are still burning fossil fuels in 50 years.
The fact that even Texas nowadays, a nation that considers that burning coal is a synonym of masculinity, is installing more and more renewable capacities. Tell you that this is something that even in a hyper-capitalistic society is going to happen.
Even with cartoon villains in power, they don’t manage to prevent that trend.
Massive fields of solar panels are centralized in their infrastructure - they have a single outlet onto the electrical grid, they are all maintained and administered in the same way, etc. - so they fit well into a centralized social power structure.
Same as farms for the past 5,000 years.
Decentralization would mean something like rooftop solar and household batteries. But even then the manufacturers could hold centralized power; you would have to be able to mix-and-match between manufacturers in usage and repair.
The key advantage to household solar is that the panels last for decades. So you need to go to the manufacturer maybe two or three times in your life. If you have to fill up your oil powered car, that needs to happen every week or so and the electricity grid can be disconnected with a flick of a switch.
Humans are naturally social animals and we really depend on others. It is mostly about avoiding exploitation. A lot of green technologies do that naturally.
Solar panels are a dystopian nightmare, the nuclear energy sector told me so.
Nuclear energy is a dystopian nightmare, the fossil fuel industry told me so.
Nuclear power actually does kind of require centralization. You’re not going to build a backyard nuclear facility because it just doesn’t scale (also your home will be raided by the IAEA and whatever three letter agencies your local government has). Gas comes out of wells, so that’s easy to centralize. Both of these can be easily centrally controlled.
Solar panels can be controlled exactly once. As soon as they’re in the hands of the end user, they’re no longer possible to control.
But even if they were centrally controlled, they’re still easy to find attached to mass surveillance devices, from which they can be expropriated popularly.
How quickly would you be dead if you tried to steal nuclear materials?
Yeah, these are very different things with very different authority profiles.
What’s so interesting to me is that in spite of the city’s green infrastructure, the inequities persist.
Solar PV has the potential to be a tool for a free society, because it can be decentralized. If it all belongs to the utility, the state or the landlords, it’s not decentralized and not used as the tool it could be.
car revs like a V10
<_< solar my ass
That’s all biofuel called CHOOH2
All aboard the CHOOH CHOOH
They knew what they were doing with that name.
We’re already at the point IRL where electric cars are made to sound like ICE cars, for purely aesthetic (i.e. assholery) reasons. And that kind of fits Night City to a T.
In Denmark they make an ICE-like noise as to warn pedestrians, before that there were accidents when people didn’t hear them and crossed the street in front of them.
There’s a big difference between emitting some noise at low speeds to warn pedestrians, and going full “screaming-loud sports car”. I’m talking about the latter.
Right. Never noticed that in Denmark, luckily 😊
Because capitalism is the issue.
