5 ms·

The article mentions the pollution there is in part for the construction of "Green" tech, like wind turbines and batteries for solar panels. Are there serious

The article mentions the pollution there is in part for the construction of "Green" tech, like wind turbines and batteries for solar panels. Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not? And what are the actually greenest energy we can have right now?

zdw 6y ago
There's a ratio of "how much energy can be stored by a device" vs "how much energy did it take to create" graph halfway down this page: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-the-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-... TL;DR: Lithium ion batteries have a ratio of around 10:1, whereas compressed air or pumped water are 200:1 or better. This is just storage - I'd be interested in the ratio on solar photovoltaic, wind, or similar power generation tech.
- StillBored 6y ago
  BTW: Surely for compressed air systems that are pumping into a high pressure container it would be possible to use a vacuum bottle design and solve the heat loss+add problem.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Along these lines, MIT Prof. Alex Slocum's proposal was to build concrete domes underwater, and evacuate them to store energy / re-fill them to release energy. The pressure difference is the difference between vacuum and hundreds of atmospheres, and there are no compressible working fluids to cause adiabatic heating losses. https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energy-storage/27357/ https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energ... (Edit: better link)
- leafmeal 6y ago
  I was sceptical of this at first. I suspected that the "how much energy can be stored" was only in regards to a single use, but I checked out the source, and this is over the lifetime of the storage medium. It blows my mind that it takes 1/10 of the energy it will ever store to manufacture a lithium ion battery.
  - Retric 6y ago
    Construction energy is less than half the story here. The inefficiency of energy storage and retrieval dominates the energy costs of using a battery. You lose 10:1 on construction, and at least another 10:1 on electric-to-electric efficiency for a net of 5:1. However, with an electric-to-electric efficiency of only 40-52% compressed air has a net efficiency of ~ 0.5:1 even if construction costs suggest 200:1 that just means it stays 0.5:1.
  - sk5t 6y ago
    Is it more or less mind-blowing to look around and note that virtually everything in our houses and offices--electronics, pots and pans, tables and chairs, autos, etc.--came out of the ground? Think about all the ore-bearing rock and soil that had to be mined, sifted, transported, refined, formed, milled, transported again, and so on, just to produce the machine that puts a label on a box. Even putting truly complex tech aside, the amount of resources we collectively tear through, day after day, to get to this (not particularly admirable) place is staggering.
- jonas21 6y ago
  I don't know if that's the right metric to look at. There's not a huge difference in going from 91% efficiency (10:1) to 99.5% efficiency (200:1). What's more concerning are the other negative externalities -- pollution, ecosystem destruction, etc, as described in the original article. This won't be captured by looking at energy stored vs. energy used in production.
- jayd16 6y ago
  Does the math work out? If you have a phone battery for only a year, that's 365 charge cycles of a 3000mAh battery. At $0.20 a kWh you end up with less than a dollar for a year's worth of power. 3000mAh*3.8v /1000 = 13.3Wh in a phone battery. 13.3Wh * $0.20/kWh * 365 ~= $0.95 a year Even at 10 years of life, it takes a dollar of energy to make a battery at a 10:1 cost? Seems like a fine trade.
- layoric 6y ago
  For power generation, the stat commonly used is “EROI” or “EROEI” Eg energy returned on energy invested. This is sometimes expressed in time range (which depends on average generation rate based on where it is installed etc) or just energy vs energy ratio (Eg kWh to produce vs lifetime kWh generated) As others have said this statistic is not the whole picture, type of pollution generated due to the construction of the solar panel, wind turbine etc should vs other technology should also be take into account so this gets pretty complex pretty quickly. Some recent studies [0] show a break down of input/output for solar with Switzerland of 9-10:1, this is likely higher if panel was installed in Australia for example and goes into some detail showing a fairly minimal amount of storage in an electricity grid (8%) increases the amount of usable generation for wind and solar which improves that ratio. Wind I believe has a better EROI but has a lot more complexity when it comes to installation, maintenance so how much this is taken into consideration and will likely vary for onshore vs offshore installations. Numbers I’ve read before were in the 16-20:1 range but can’t find any decent study sources at the moment. Hope that helps. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516307066 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
- pas 6y ago
  That tl;dr is interesting, but note that batteries are optimzed for a lot of things (eg. energy density for easy mobility, recharge rate, safety), while larger storage systems are a lot more optimized for efficiency.
brundolf 6y ago
Worth noting is that there's no single definition of "green". Sometimes tradeoffs have to be made. Personally, I would tend to say that a single concentrated pollution event is less important than global runaway climate-change. Another interesting example of environmental trade-offs is the plastic bag ban (where the disposable, ultra-light-weight plastic bags at supermarkets are banned in favor of heavier, reusable plastic and paper bags). The lighter bags: - break more easily, making them harder to re-use - tend to blow around and get stuck in trees, rivers, etc, causing visible pollution However, the heavier bags: - emit a lot more carbon through their transportation (because of the extra weight) - put more total plastic into the world at the end of the day unless everyone reuses all of them (which many people don't) Just like there's no single definition of "healthy food", there's no single definition of "good for the environment".
- Ottolay 6y ago
  Or you could just use reusable bags... That said I fully agree with the larger point. We have to be willing to weigh and accept tradeoffs.
  - zizee 6y ago
    Reusable bags support the argument the GP was making about tradeoffs. Reusable bags are good for stopping the production of plastic waste, but the resulting CO2 emissions are much greater that single use thin plastic bags, unless you reuse the reusable bags thousands of times. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/12/17337602/plastic-tote-bags-climate-change-litter-life-cycle-assessments-environment https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/12/17337602/plastic-tote-bag...
    - elmomle 6y ago
      Honestly, the long-term answer is to not make these things out of plastic. If we were to use net or cloth bags, and if all new bags (and fabrication materials) were taxed to the point that the only economically viable choices were sustainable overall, then that would achieve sustainability (e.g., people would repair bags--by sewing or weave--instead of discarding. This is the actual way to solve the problem. The issue there, of course, is that we have a whole modern civilization built around consuming and discarding, and it's hard to achieve change once these habits are built and there's little direct incentive for change. It's entirely feasible--sometimes people point to "labor specialization", but it takes a day (if that) to learn to do basic sewing and weaving pretty well--but we would need to drastically shift (back) to a rather un-capitalist society of home industry with very strong incentives for mending rather than replacing.
hjek 6y ago
> Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not? The Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans[0] tries to answer that question. Strongly recommended. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE
- pas 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...

zdw 6y ago

There's a ratio of "how much energy can be stored by a device" vs "how much energy did it take to create" graph halfway down this page: https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-off-the-grid-compressed-air-energy-storage.html https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2018/05/ditch-the-batteries-... TL;DR: Lithium ion batteries have a ratio of around 10:1, whereas compressed air or pumped water are 200:1 or better. This is just storage - I'd be interested in the ratio on solar photovoltaic, wind, or similar power generation tech.

StillBored 6y ago
BTW: Surely for compressed air systems that are pumping into a high pressure container it would be possible to use a vacuum bottle design and solve the heat loss+add problem.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Along these lines, MIT Prof. Alex Slocum's proposal was to build concrete domes underwater, and evacuate them to store energy / re-fill them to release energy. The pressure difference is the difference between vacuum and hundreds of atmospheres, and there are no compressible working fluids to cause adiabatic heating losses. https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energy-storage/27357/ https://newatlas.com/mit-offshore-wind-concrete-sphere-energ... (Edit: better link)
leafmeal 6y ago
I was sceptical of this at first. I suspected that the "how much energy can be stored" was only in regards to a single use, but I checked out the source, and this is over the lifetime of the storage medium. It blows my mind that it takes 1/10 of the energy it will ever store to manufacture a lithium ion battery.
- Retric 6y ago
  Construction energy is less than half the story here. The inefficiency of energy storage and retrieval dominates the energy costs of using a battery. You lose 10:1 on construction, and at least another 10:1 on electric-to-electric efficiency for a net of 5:1. However, with an electric-to-electric efficiency of only 40-52% compressed air has a net efficiency of ~ 0.5:1 even if construction costs suggest 200:1 that just means it stays 0.5:1.
- sk5t 6y ago
  Is it more or less mind-blowing to look around and note that virtually everything in our houses and offices--electronics, pots and pans, tables and chairs, autos, etc.--came out of the ground? Think about all the ore-bearing rock and soil that had to be mined, sifted, transported, refined, formed, milled, transported again, and so on, just to produce the machine that puts a label on a box. Even putting truly complex tech aside, the amount of resources we collectively tear through, day after day, to get to this (not particularly admirable) place is staggering.
jonas21 6y ago
I don't know if that's the right metric to look at. There's not a huge difference in going from 91% efficiency (10:1) to 99.5% efficiency (200:1). What's more concerning are the other negative externalities -- pollution, ecosystem destruction, etc, as described in the original article. This won't be captured by looking at energy stored vs. energy used in production.
jayd16 6y ago
Does the math work out? If you have a phone battery for only a year, that's 365 charge cycles of a 3000mAh battery. At $0.20 a kWh you end up with less than a dollar for a year's worth of power. 3000mAh*3.8v /1000 = 13.3Wh in a phone battery. 13.3Wh * $0.20/kWh * 365 ~= $0.95 a year Even at 10 years of life, it takes a dollar of energy to make a battery at a 10:1 cost? Seems like a fine trade.
layoric 6y ago
For power generation, the stat commonly used is “EROI” or “EROEI” Eg energy returned on energy invested. This is sometimes expressed in time range (which depends on average generation rate based on where it is installed etc) or just energy vs energy ratio (Eg kWh to produce vs lifetime kWh generated) As others have said this statistic is not the whole picture, type of pollution generated due to the construction of the solar panel, wind turbine etc should vs other technology should also be take into account so this gets pretty complex pretty quickly. Some recent studies [0] show a break down of input/output for solar with Switzerland of 9-10:1, this is likely higher if panel was installed in Australia for example and goes into some detail showing a fairly minimal amount of storage in an electricity grid (8%) increases the amount of usable generation for wind and solar which improves that ratio. Wind I believe has a better EROI but has a lot more complexity when it comes to installation, maintenance so how much this is taken into consideration and will likely vary for onshore vs offshore installations. Numbers I’ve read before were in the 16-20:1 range but can’t find any decent study sources at the moment. Hope that helps. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421516307066 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030142151...
pas 6y ago
That tl;dr is interesting, but note that batteries are optimzed for a lot of things (eg. energy density for easy mobility, recharge rate, safety), while larger storage systems are a lot more optimized for efficiency.

brundolf 6y ago

Worth noting is that there's no single definition of "green". Sometimes tradeoffs have to be made. Personally, I would tend to say that a single concentrated pollution event is less important than global runaway climate-change. Another interesting example of environmental trade-offs is the plastic bag ban (where the disposable, ultra-light-weight plastic bags at supermarkets are banned in favor of heavier, reusable plastic and paper bags). The lighter bags: - break more easily, making them harder to re-use - tend to blow around and get stuck in trees, rivers, etc, causing visible pollution However, the heavier bags: - emit a lot more carbon through their transportation (because of the extra weight) - put more total plastic into the world at the end of the day unless everyone reuses all of them (which many people don't) Just like there's no single definition of "healthy food", there's no single definition of "good for the environment".

Ottolay 6y ago
Or you could just use reusable bags... That said I fully agree with the larger point. We have to be willing to weigh and accept tradeoffs.
- zizee 6y ago
  Reusable bags support the argument the GP was making about tradeoffs. Reusable bags are good for stopping the production of plastic waste, but the resulting CO2 emissions are much greater that single use thin plastic bags, unless you reuse the reusable bags thousands of times. https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/12/17337602/plastic-tote-bags-climate-change-litter-life-cycle-assessments-environment https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/12/17337602/plastic-tote-bag...
  - elmomle 6y ago
    Honestly, the long-term answer is to not make these things out of plastic. If we were to use net or cloth bags, and if all new bags (and fabrication materials) were taxed to the point that the only economically viable choices were sustainable overall, then that would achieve sustainability (e.g., people would repair bags--by sewing or weave--instead of discarding. This is the actual way to solve the problem. The issue there, of course, is that we have a whole modern civilization built around consuming and discarding, and it's hard to achieve change once these habits are built and there's little direct incentive for change. It's entirely feasible--sometimes people point to "labor specialization", but it takes a day (if that) to learn to do basic sewing and weaving pretty well--but we would need to drastically shift (back) to a rather un-capitalist society of home industry with very strong incentives for mending rather than replacing.

hjek 6y ago

> Are there serious research about how much this "green" tech is actually greener or not? The Michael Moore produced documentary Planet of the Humans[0] tries to answer that question. Strongly recommended. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

pas 6y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_accuracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Humans#Factual_a...