3 ms·
Because it's overstating the facts ("no other source", "seen only in Star Trek", "as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography", "ridiculous
by cygx 6y ago
Because it's overstating the facts ("no other source", "seen only in Star Trek", "as much understanding of energy as flat earthers do of geography", "ridiculous"), contradicting any study on the topic I've seen (which, to be fair, might have been a biased sample).
This was my take-away when I looked into it a couple of years ago:
Going 60% renewable is not much of a problem.
80% needs investment into infrastructure, but still viable.
100% would need better storage technology - or the political will to make cuts:
You first need to build enough off-shore windparks, storage and smarter grids to get you through the 'Dunkelflaute' (simultaneous reduced energy production from solar and on-shore wind due to weather conditions, sometimes for weeks!).
There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to adjust to uneven levels of power generation, eg by shutting down some industries when production is low, and dumping excess power somewhere when it's high (smelting, scientific experiments, bitcoin mining, whatever).
- orwin 6y agoWe don't need 100% renewable, we need 350% renewable. Electricity is at best 25% of our energy usage. 20% of the energy i'm consumming everyday come from nuclear and i'm living in France, where 80% of our power grid is nuclear. And we need the grid investment in copper that comme with it if we want a distributed grid. And a secondary grid to serve hospital and emergency buildings. Oh, and we need Veolia's solar panel recycling plant: its economical, recylce 91 to 95% of the product (granted, the less important part) and it only cost 8 time the raw materials, making it the most efficient solar panel recycling plant (and the only one in the world of its size). It also cost 5 time the energy of raw material extraction and transformation, and weirdly, this is never taken into account when the cost of solar PV is on the table, as if everyone think we can just put lead and cadmium in a landfill. Oh yeah, that's right, we can and we did, nice job us.
- pif 6y ago> There's nothing that prevents us from doing so with the technology of today if we're prepared to ... We are not prepared to, neither do we want to.