3 ms·

Among the blockers are (1) economics and (2) availability of raw & finished materials. This is all in the public domain, if you go looking for the numbers. I’m

by alvah 3y ago

Among the blockers are (1) economics and (2) availability of raw & finished materials. This is all in the public domain, if you go looking for the numbers. I’m not saying your claim about the rapid pace of building out battery storage is false - your claim is true. However, there is no currently-feasible way to run an advanced industrial economy on intermittent energy sources backed by chemical batteries. It may become technically feasible at some point in the future (never bet against human ingenuity in the long run), but it’s technically and economically impractical right now.

epistasis 3y ago
Not sure what you mean by blockers or "impractical right now" but at best that's "we haven't built the mines or factories, yet." Which is not in any way a fundamental blocker on our ability to build what we want to build. There are of course feasible ways of running our entire economy entirely on renewables, saying otherwise means ignoring the massive amount of literature on the topic: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 Every argument I have ever seen attempted to say it is not possible makes simplifying unrealistic assumptions. Such as saying something silly like "here's our known lithium reserves, that's not enough."" Of course, our known reserves of lithium is going up every year, because we keep on looking for more, and the argument is not even sophisticated enough to acknowledge what proven reserves means as a concept. So if you think you have a solid argument present it, and if I'm convinced let's get it published and overturn all this other literature.
- alvah 3y ago
  Your link talks (theoretically, not practically) about 100% RE by 2060! Do you understand what “currently” means? You hand-wave with “we haven’t built the mines or factories, yet”. In the real world, discovery, proving, permits, construction, and commissioning new mines can take many years - and that’s if sufficient quantities of the required minerals are feasibly recoverable, or in a jurisdiction that allows extraction and export (e.g. not China). So let’s get back to the real world & be realistic. 100% RE is not currently viable for an advanced industrial economy. Let’s get all the published literature revised to get rid of the hand-waves and ivory tower theoretical BS.

by alvah 3y ago

epistasis 3y ago

Not sure what you mean by blockers or "impractical right now" but at best that's "we haven't built the mines or factories, yet." Which is not in any way a fundamental blocker on our ability to build what we want to build. There are of course feasible ways of running our entire economy entirely on renewables, saying otherwise means ignoring the massive amount of literature on the topic: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910 Every argument I have ever seen attempted to say it is not possible makes simplifying unrealistic assumptions. Such as saying something silly like "here's our known lithium reserves, that's not enough."" Of course, our known reserves of lithium is going up every year, because we keep on looking for more, and the argument is not even sophisticated enough to acknowledge what proven reserves means as a concept. So if you think you have a solid argument present it, and if I'm convinced let's get it published and overturn all this other literature.

alvah 3y ago
Your link talks (theoretically, not practically) about 100% RE by 2060! Do you understand what “currently” means? You hand-wave with “we haven’t built the mines or factories, yet”. In the real world, discovery, proving, permits, construction, and commissioning new mines can take many years - and that’s if sufficient quantities of the required minerals are feasibly recoverable, or in a jurisdiction that allows extraction and export (e.g. not China). So let’s get back to the real world & be realistic. 100% RE is not currently viable for an advanced industrial economy. Let’s get all the published literature revised to get rid of the hand-waves and ivory tower theoretical BS.