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> The renewables industry likes to downplay the sheer volume of fossil fuels required to manufacture the parts. The energy ROI on this is quite poor, and in man
by graeme 6y ago
> The renewables industry likes to downplay the sheer volume of fossil fuels required to manufacture the parts. The energy ROI on this is quite poor, and in many cases, we would have been better off skipping the intermediate step and burning the oil and gas directly.
Is this from electricity (which could be renewable in future), or is there an actual hard requirement for carbon in terms of burning very hot materials to generate heat in the manufacturing process or something?
- biren34 6y agoSome of it is in base materials and some of it in smelting requirements (though I'm not 100% sure how much of that could be replaced by electricity). Most of it is in the mining, refining, and transport of the massive quantities of metals needed to manufacture and install the combination of generation, transport, transformation, and storage equipment + the second/third order equipment to manufacture the electrical equipment. Our supply chains are dependent on fossil fuels for all of this, and we're a long long way off from replicating even a fraction of it with a purely electrical version. If we do choose to pursue that goal (which I think is worthwhile), the renewables still lack the energy ROI to make it feasible. We can do it, but it pretty much requires wide scale adoption of nuclear for the thermodynamics to work out.