Comment on It's a pretty solarpunk fact that small, distributed wind turbines use steel more efficiently than big centralised ones

sonori@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle. It also didn’t mention household or village scale as much as was still comparing very large grid scale systems, which is important as once you get much smaller than that energy efficiency falls off a cliff.

Finally, while a detailed look into a specific resource can be very interesting, it’s important to take a holistic look at how energy sources compare and not just evaluate on one figure.

Ultimately, as our ability to manufacture steel is not currently a major constraint to decarbonization, more important limitations like installation and maintenance costs are going to be dominant at least for the next few decades. Similarly as the low hanging fruit like electricity generation make up less and less of our collective GHG emissions, we’ll have more resources like plentiful wind energy to throw at problems like decarbonizing steel, as its still a problem will have to solve sooner or later.

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