Comment on The World Has a Serious Coal Problem

• wolfyvegan@slrpnk.net ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  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.

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  • palitu@aussie.zone ⁨20⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    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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