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> Here a summary of the regional effects in, er, all parts of the world
Have you read the summary? (Or even the IEA link I posted?) Because the shock in every single one of those countries was because of fossil fuel prices/shortages or climate change, not renewables.
> In fact, blades currently cannot be recycled, whereas the largest part by mass, the base, could be but routinely is not.
Hence the bad faith arguments and misinformation. Suddenly there’s all this care about lack of recyclability when it comes to clean energy, but not a care in the world about the pollution put into the air by fossil fuels. Or the coal ash from coal plants. Or electronic waste. Or municipal waste.
Of course there are no such concerns since this isn’t a serious argument. It’s put forth by people who already have their conclusions (renewables bad) and are looking for any reason to believe this.
Wind and solar produce a fraction of the amount of waste that fossil fuel sources produce per unit of energy created, and produce a minuscule amount of waste in absolute terms.
As for wind turbine blades, they are inert composites. Bury them and move on, they are about as best case scenario for garbage as we can get.
> which challenges the economic sanity of 100% intermittent renewable targets.
A) Don’t move the goal posts. We aren’t talking about 100% intermittent renewables.
And B) did you read the paper you posted or simple find the first one that confirms your biases? I’ll quote: “The LFSCOE…
When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it.
People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions.
Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article.
In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN:
Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/
Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/
There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write…
There is important lesson to learn from here.
Everybody who claims that there is not enough some mineral for something must consider the following. First in every moment in time there are certain number of mineral resources - these are known deposits that are not all necessarily accessible economically, but some of them are - these are reserves.
If the demand for something increases then also the price will increase, making more of the resources available as usable reserves at the new price point. At the same time it increases the incentives to find even more new resources.
More over, if there is certain amount of mineral already in circulation then it may suddenly become economically viable to recycle it, limiting the demand for new resources.
What is important to observe instead is if the increase in production can follow the increase in demand and if the resources grow at such speed that the growth can continue.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/lithium-electric-vehicles
That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.” https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants#:~:text=The%20capacity%20factor%20of%20China's,re%20now%20running%20around%2050%25.
By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 2023 alone which came online over the year. IE adding ~20GW in December has 1/12th impact in 2023, but it’s now online for the next ~25 years. Which is why some predictions have China using less coal in 2024 despite bringing new power plants online in 2023.
China alone represents 30% of the world’s electricity production/consumption so it has real impact, but they just don’t have the natural gas supplies which the US has used to ween itself off coal.
> Vaclav Smil's excellent analysis on this is worth reading: https://privatebank.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-wm-aem/glob...
While a good read, I'm not sure how anyone can take this seriously. He says " Efficiency gains from the electrification of industrial processes would vary widely, and not all of them could be electrified. And there will be negligible gains for space heating , with 100% efficiency for electric resistance heating compared to as much as 93-99% for modern gas furnaces (Lennox 2023)."
Heat pumps have a COP of 1.5 - 4, which are eventually going to replace all heating/cooling. He does not consider efficiency from heat pumps at all.
Two thirds of fossil fuel energy is wasted: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/US%20Energy%202022.png
Electrification is efficient and the transition won't need as much: https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
It's worth noting that California is one of the wealthiest regions in the world, yet it faces extremely high electricity bills to achieve its goals.
On the other hand, nuclear power is criticized while France, which relies heavily on nuclear energy, enjoys some of the lowest electricity rates in Europe.
Claiming that nuclear power is an irrelevant option in 2024 for decarbonizing by 2050 is simply false. The timeline for nuclear construction is well-documented and realistic. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/nuclear-construction-time
How can you apply California's model to poorer countries when even California hasn't fully decarbonized? France, on the other hand, achieved significant decarbonization decades ago.
It's ironic that people like you see the fight against climate change as an opportunity to attack nuclear power. Be honest about your intentions.