This article ignores a lot of reality when it comes to firming renewables, and my paranoia was triggered when they wrote mainstream media.
Shilling out for the fossil fuel lobby.
Sure, it is not going to be easy, or quick (enough), but cost is going to drive out the more expensive forms of generation, which will be coal and gas.
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Do you know of a way to efficiently produce the infrastructure needed for solar, wind, etc using energy from solar, wind, etc such that the energy return on energy (ERoE) is high enough? That seemed like the crux of the argument made in the article, and I’d be interested to read a rebuttal.
Thats from 2010 btw. Oil got even worse with fracking and solar and wind way better. Wikipedia has a bunch of examples.
I don’t doubt that the return on investment for solar and wind will continue to improve relative to fossil fuels when used for electricity generation, but the problem seems to be, again, the manufacture of infrastructure such as wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and so on, which require energy-intensive mining and refining of minerals. Unless every stage of the manufacturing process can be electrified, the efficiency of generating electricity using wind and solar won’t matter in the slightest, as there will be no way to use that electricity to eventually recycle/replace the existing wind/solar infrastructure, let alone to deploy more of it or to do either of these while maintaining the high energy return on energy invested.
To be clear, I don’t want solar/wind/etc to be dependent on fossil fuels at all, and so I would be interested to read an explanation of how these (or other) clean energy technologies can be deployed without using fossil fuels at any stage of the process. The problem presented in the article seems to be that such technologies currently do depend upon the use of coal, and I posted the article here with the idea that it might get people to start thinking about potential solutions to this problem, not to suggest that the deployment of clean energy technologies is not worthwhile.
Realistically, even if photovoltaic panels and wind turbines can be recycled 100% efficiently, the supply of energy from these sources at any given time will still have an upper limit based on the finite supply of the minerals required for these technologies, so people cannot continue to increase their energy consumption indefinitely even from “renewable” sources. But that’s a separate problem.
There is a lot of research into hard to abate sectors, I actually work for a heavy mining company that is doing just that.
Aluminum smelting is doing a lot of work going to renewables as it is cheaper and more sustainable for them.
It does take a an operational strategy change for it to work though., but it is possible in a lot of sectors.
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I think that is a bit of a mis-direct. We don’t need that now, but we do need to develop it. There are plenty of electricity sources that provide enough for industry (plenty of hydro as a simple example).
The chemical processes require research and subsequent change, but removing thermal coal and just using coking coal is a massive reduction in coal usage. Maybe that is ok to get us over the hump. There is a lot of research into direct reduced iron, which is an example of removing coal from that particular process. It is not impossible, but currently maybe not too easy.
There is nothing inherently preventing these things to be done with electricity from renewable sources (and the carbon for the chemical processes only acts as a cheap oxygen acceptor). It is just that burning coal is still cheaper and has existing infrastructure.
There are many economic areas where replacing fossile fuels is indeed very difficult, and only mining somewhat falls into those. The material processing necessary for solar panel production would be actually more simple and energy efficient with electricity. For example a lot of aluminium ore is already processed with electricity produced from geothermal sources in Europe.
I feel like an ethics-optional group that wants to really end the use of coal could run a campaign of breaking into or drilling down to the most profitable commercial coal seams and lighting them on fire. More Centralia, Pennsylvanias, especially in populated areas, would probably permanently dampen the domestic industry and drive prices far upwards leading to the faster growth of alternatives. The obvious tradeoff is, those seams your group lit are going to burn for a very very long time, so you’re causing some emissions in exchange for a global reduction.
It would seem that scaling back the use of many modern technologies is both necessary and inevitable. When hydrocarbon-based energy sources run out, it’s back to old-fashioned carbohydrates…
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