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I would agree that overall population would seem like the fundamental problem, and question whether the effort involved to relocate everyone into cities unless absolutely necessary would justify the resources involved, which could instead be spent on trying to stop population growth.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:01
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Palace of Hate, you are just wildly citing sources without explaining them or doing any sort of analysis or comparison.Palace of Hate posted:http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2007/07/just-how-much-land-does-solar-power.html ya it matters This source is just calculating how energy dense an old PV solar plant is compared to a nuclear power plant. Yes, it is worse. Why does that really matter? You haven't built a case here at all. Palace of Hate posted:http://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1021/es071763q ya because it takes 100kWh to manufacture 1 meter squared of solar panel, disregarding other deleterious environmental consequences of the manufacturing process as a result of chemical toxicity I think that you frantically googled something here without actually reading the source. Did you read the source? It actually concludes the opposite of what you are trying to say. 100 kWh is not really that much energy and you really aren't comparing it to anything. Assuming that that number is correct, and just doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, it means that it only takes ~ 1000 hours of direct sunlight from a good solar cell to generate enough electricity to recoup the energy cost of making the cell. What chemical toxicity issues would you like to highlight? Yes, I am aware that chemicals are used in the manufacturing of solar cells, just like in almost every manufacturing process. Are they particularly nasty chemicals? Are large volumes of them needed compared to other energy generation technologies?
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Apr 28, 2015 23:05
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RDevz posted:Getting the biomass to the power station is another massive problem. Its energy density is something like 2/3 of the GJ/tonne that you get from coal (c. 16 vs. c. 24), which means you need more ships and more trains to get it to where it's needed. Trabisnikof posted:The energy cost to ship something in bulk by train can be pretty low. But then again, most of the time you mine-mouth that poo poo and site your Ag based biomass facility in Ag country and your city-dump based biogas facility near the city dump. Large-scale use of biomass wouldn't suffer quite the same limitations as lignite (it has an even lower energy density than lignite, but it would presumably be exempt from carbon tariffs). Nonetheless, it would still be a regional commodity (with regional supply/demand and pricing issues) rather than a globally fungible one.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:06
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OwlFancier posted:I would agree that overall population would seem like the fundamental problem, and question whether the effort involved to relocate everyone into cities unless absolutely necessary would justify the resources involved, which could instead be spent on trying to stop population growth. Both are happening, and both relate to each other. As developing countries urbanize their population growth goes down. Urban living does not require or reward huge families like rural living does. Economics are also doing their part to kill rural life. The question isn't if we should urbanize most of the world's population, that is happening, the question is how to do it in the most efficient and livable ways possible. One of the most important things we can do is actually accept that mass urbanization is happening, isn't going to stop, and is in fact a good thing. Then dedicate resources towards both helping it along and making sure the results are good. This means changing spending priorities. Stop expanding suburban highway systems and slowly cut back on subsidies to sadly now-useless rural communities, stop subsidizing driving and home ownership and instead massively invest in transit, affordable housing, and energy/resource efficiency measures within cities. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 23:13
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OwlFancier posted:Of course it isn't, but my point is that if you are trying to avoid high levels of pollution, you're going to need to dump your poo poo somewhere. If you're trying to let nature return to greenery, that seems somewhat incompatible with dumping poo poo all over it, not to mention the increased transport costs of moving all the poo poo out of your backyard to somewhere else. Massive vertical farms produce orders of magnitudes higher yields per hectare, which means once you grow staple crops in them your farmland area drops to a tiny fraction of what it was before. They will have an outlet pipe that spews nutrient rich waste, but said waste will be much less of a problem than just spraying fertiliser and slurry onto fields and pretending it doesn't seep into the water supply (it does) and hoping it doesn't gently caress up habitats via eutrophication (it does), and there will be a lower fraction of wasted fertiliser in a hydroponic or aeroponic farm since you can apply it directly to the crop. We can also expect less pesticide use, assuming the farm isn't open air so bugs don't get in as much. By the way, vertical farms are actually getting built (in countries which don't have a stick up their rear end about By the way, diffuse sources of pollution are not better than point sources, because you can at least run everything through a sewage treatment plant while I wish anyone who thinks about getting rid of e.g. diffuse nitrate sources along entire river catchments good luck and unlimited funding. Great examples of spreading out pollution not working: every oligotrophic habitat in Central Europe ever, since e.g. in the Netherlands and NW Germany no heathland and fens (fens being the ~one true NW German lowland habitat type~) can exist on a permanent basis anymore due to diffuse nitrogen (i.e. nitrate) inputs mainly from agriculture and also from transportation. Ironically this is mostly due to Germany being poo poo and just releasing unfiltered air from animal pens and spraying slurry onto fields, instead of doing it the Dutch way which means dripping slurry and filtering exhaust air and using lots of greenhouses. silence_kit posted:Palace of Hate, you are just wildly citing sources without explaining them or doing any sort of analysis or comparison.  from Climate change and conservation Prof Barry Brook's blog suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 23:15
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Baronjutter posted:Both are happening, and both relate to each other. As developing countries urbanize their population growth goes down. Urban living does not require or reward huge families like rural living does. Economics are also doing their part to kill rural life. The question isn't if we should urbanize most of the world's population, that is happening, the question is how to do it in the most efficient and livable ways possible. I would agree with that at least. If it's happening anyway, best to make it bearable.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:17
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Personally I still don't see vertical farms as necessary for primary food supply, though they certainly seem like they may be useful for secondary supply and their natural ability to easily keep needed temperatures allowing growing of various exotic foods for a climate for cheaper than it can be shipped out.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:20
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OwlFancier posted:I would agree that overall population would seem like the fundamental problem, and question whether the effort involved to relocate everyone into cities unless absolutely necessary would justify the resources involved, which could instead be spent on trying to stop population growth. We will still have 10 billion people if every woman on the planet suddenly decides to have 2.1 kids (currently it's around 2.5, so not terrifyingly high anymore and we will have like 11-12 billion people tops, probably). The population pyramid will fill up to be a population cylinder even at replacement fertility, so unless you move on from family planning to banning reproduction we have a good amount of inevitable growth already baked in.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:22
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I've GUESSED at this for years, telling solar/wind advocates not to discount the amount of concrete and steel needed for their green energy dreams. I think we've had people in this very thread saying "woah nuclear reactors need like sooooo much concrete and steel to build that isn't green!" Now we have an actual graph, thanks for this.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:23
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blowfish posted:We will still have 10 billion people if every woman on the planet suddenly decides to have 2.1 kids (currently it's around 2.5, so not terrifyingly high anymore and we will have like 11-12 billion people tops, probably). The population pyramid will fill up to be a population cylinder even at replacement fertility, so unless you move on from family planning to banning reproduction we have a good amount of inevitable growth already baked in. Massive propaganda campaign: "Don't have children, buy a boat instead"? It's what sold me.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:23
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OwlFancier posted:Massive propaganda campaign: "Don't have children, buy a boat instead"? One of Hans Rosling's finer* moments on world population. May or may not be somewhat on the optimistic side, but shows that with the exception of war-torn hellholes and failed states, birth rates are dropping towards replacement everywhere and the era of exponential population growth is ending. *not related to misunderestimating ebola outbreaks based on past quick burn-outs
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Apr 28, 2015 23:29
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Baronjutter posted:I've GUESSED at this for years, telling solar/wind advocates not to discount the amount of concrete and steel needed for their green energy dreams. I think we've had people in this very thread saying "woah nuclear reactors need like sooooo much concrete and steel to build that isn't green!" Now we have an actual graph, thanks for this. Few knowledgable people who are arguing in favor of increased solar or wind are arguing that either technology should make up 100% of the supply, so that chart is pretty meaningless in an informed debate. But I guess you might find a use for it on facebook. Also, what on earth kind of metric is tonnes/per-day until 2050?? Looking into it...the ISA report he claims for wind turbine concrete figures is about nuclear power and doesn't mention concrete usage per MW at all. So I don't know if this is the best chart to stake your claim on. Edit: yeah that chart is assuming we'd be adding ~2GW baseplate capacity a day, every day until 2050. Which is not going to happen. An interesting "what if" however. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 23:43 on Apr 28, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 23:37
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Again, you aren't actually making any arguments and are just throwing a bunch of stuff at me hoping that something will stick. Ok, taking right plot you showed as a given, wind will need 100x more land than nuclear. So what? In the US, don't we already have a lot of agricultural land where we could put windmills anyway? Taking the left plot as a given, why is it so important that wind uses ~ 5-10x more concrete and steel than nuclear energy? How much does it compare to the production of concrete and steel today? If it is just a drop in the bucket, then it doesn't matter much. Edit: Assuming that guy's numbers are reasonable, if we were to use wind to replace all of the world's energy needs (note: no one is actually arguing that this is economical or should be done), we would have to devote ~ 1/10th of current steel production and 1/1000th of concrete production to making wind mills. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 28, 2015 23:40
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silence_kit posted:In the US, don't we already have a lot of agricultural land where we could put windmills anyway? just a drop in the bucket, then it doesn't matter much.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:47
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Rent-A-Cop posted:You can't eat windmills. You can farm around them though, we have lots of them in working fields over here.
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Apr 28, 2015 23:47
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OwlFancier posted:You can farm around them though, we have lots of them in working fields over here. In fact they even do it in US just in....Texas 
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Apr 28, 2015 23:54
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Trabisnikof posted:Edit: yeah that chart is assuming we'd be adding ~2GW baseplate capacity a day, every day until 2050. Which is not going to happen. An interesting "what if" however. What is a more realistic number?
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Apr 28, 2015 23:56
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silence_kit posted:What is a more realistic number? Well, EIA estimates more along the lines of 7-12 GW (baseplate) a year. This is from Wind Visions, which looks into a high wind investment scenario. quote:Further, the analysis concluded that the U.S. wind supply chain has capacity to support Study Scenario wind deployment levels, with cumulative installations of 113 GW of generating capacity by 2020, 224 GW by 2030, and 404 GW by 2050, building from 61 GW installed as of the end of 2013.
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Apr 29, 2015 00:06
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OwlFancier posted:Depends on the poo poo. That's literally how most of the world used to do it for a long time. Great, most of the world also dealt with fun things like most babies dying before they're old enough to work and yanking abcessed teeth out with wooden pliers. And in every single case, "most of the world" fled the farms for the growing, industrializing cities as soon as they got the loving chance because farming to live sucks a high hard one. There are almost 8 billion people on this planet. They're going to eat, and they're going to poo poo. Saying "Oh well it'd be better if everyone lived in much lower population densities" doesn't work. quote:And again, it's not just about waste, water and food are also far easier to get from a distributed area than from a very small space. How do you feed a city without large amounts of surrounding farmland? Huh? It's way easier to deliver water to a million people in a small city than it is to get it to a million spread out over a large area. Yes, you need large amounts of surrounding farmland to feed a city, but you know what? It's a fucklot better for everyone if that surrounding farmland is producing the maximum amount of crops/acre than it is if everyone who lives in that city decides to go out to the fields and grow just enough food for them to eat. See, oh, Cambodia, and *literally everywhere else that has been tried*.
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Apr 29, 2015 00:18
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Rent-A-Cop posted:You can't eat windmills. A farmer can make quite a bit of money from them if they have the right wind conditions on their field, they take up a tiny percentage of their land.
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Apr 29, 2015 05:34
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It's a pretty common story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khNxvhMeJsM
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Apr 29, 2015 08:23
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Trabisnikof posted:Well, EIA estimates more along the lines of 7-12 GW (baseplate) a year. This is from Wind Visions, which looks into a high wind investment scenario. It's an estimate for a hypothetical 100% wind, 100% solar, or 100% nuclear for the world to replace all fossil fuels. Obviously it will be a mix in reality, and we will miss the mark and have over 2°C warming and take much longer to do it.
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Apr 29, 2015 08:55
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silence_kit posted:Again, you aren't actually making any arguments and are just throwing a bunch of stuff at me hoping that something will stick. His case is that wind power and solar power both require a fuckton of land and resource management, and he supported his case with the sources that he keeps showing you. In the interest of doing as little ecological harm as possible, it makes sense to strive to use as few resources and as little land as possible when deciding on an energy generation plan for the future. Solar power and wind power both require way more land and resources than nuclear power, so from an ecological standpoint they're both considerably less desirable than nuclear power. "Just put them on farms" is fine and all, but it doesn't come anywhere close to meeting our needs. quote:Edit: Assuming that guy's numbers are reasonable, if we were to use wind to replace all of the world's energy needs (note: no one is actually arguing that this is economical or should be done), we would have to devote ~ 1/10th of current steel production and 1/1000th of concrete production to making wind mills. That's a lot of ecological damage and pollution that you're nonchalantly handwaving away.
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Apr 29, 2015 10:43
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OwlFancier posted:I would agree that overall population would seem like the fundamental problem, and question whether the effort involved to relocate everyone into cities unless absolutely necessary would justify the resources involved, which could instead be spent on trying to stop population growth. How you stop population growth: give people money, access to birth control (already happening). How you don't stop population growth: lamenting the UN for letting families decide how many kids they want like the person who coined "tragedy of the commons" was ranting about.
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Apr 29, 2015 14:51
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QuarkJets posted:is case is that wind power and solar power both require a fuckton of land and resource management, and he supported his case with the sources that he keeps showing you. In the interest of doing as little ecological harm as possible, it makes sense to strive to use as few resources and as little land as possible when deciding on an energy generation plan for the future. Obviously, it is better to be more energy dense than not, but is wind and flat plate solar PV's energy density a problem? No one has actually answered this question in a meaningful way. Does it actually matter to optimize for land and resources when the required land and resources is not really that much? Obviously, when utilities add new energy sources on the grid, they aren't just optimizing for that and instead, they are doing an optimization problem with a lot of variables. QuarkJets posted:"Just put them on farms" is fine and all, but it doesn't come anywhere close to meeting our needs. Does it? No one has actually answered this question. Everybody just posts random sources at me, none of which answer the question. QuarkJets posted:That's a lot of ecological damage and pollution that you're nonchalantly handwaving away. It isn't really--it's dwarfed by that of current industry. The concrete required to power the world with windmills is 1/1000th of current world production. This is a drop in the bucket! The steel required, being 1/10th of current production is more noticeable. The steel number is inflated somewhat because the source adds batteries as well as the windmills to the material usage, which may be required if you wanted to power the US with only windmills. Who said that I or anybody is committed to electrifying the grid only with wind energy? It's irrelevant. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 15:36
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silence_kit posted:The steel required, being 1/10th of current production is more noticeable. The steel number is inflated somewhat because the source adds batteries as well as the windmills to the material usage cost, which may be required if you wanted to power the US with windmills. Who said that I or anybody is committed to electrifying the grid only with wind energy? It's irrelevant. Kinda skipping over the blades, generator, and other more rare earth metal bits aren't you?
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Apr 29, 2015 15:40
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silence_kit posted:Does it? No one has actually answered this question. Everybody just posts random sources at me, none of which answer the question. Leaving nuclear aside, it's biomass powerplants or ridiculous piles of batteries or ridiculous amounts of pumped storage and hydro (which uses steel and concrete last I checked  and is currently destroying the last intact river ecosystems in Europe) that will support a carbon neutral power grid. Using more biomass powerplants instead of batteries means you now need more farmland because you're actually farming energy crops and the already-existing farmland is still producing food or animal feed, so that still means more environmental damage from land use.
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Apr 29, 2015 15:44
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CommieGIR posted:Kinda skipping over the blades, generator, and other more rare earth metal bits aren't you? Well, instead of lazily speculating about rare earth metals, you could actually make an argument. What is it? Edit: I'm not actually making any argument. I'm just asking for someone to support the assertion that the energy density of wind and flat plate solar PV generation makes them irrelevant technologies. Well, they've hemmed and hawed for a couple of pages now, and still haven't really supported it. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:06 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 15:51
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silence_kit posted:Well, instead of lazily speculating about rare earth metals, you could actually make an argument. What is it? The only company that does not use rare earth metals in their generators is Enercon. It is a significant concern, as, well, they are called rare earth metals for a reason. Here's the thing: Wind and Solar are still not going to be replacing/usurping coal any time soon. They are a great supplement, but still nowhere near as good at meeting demand as coal, nuclear, gas, etc.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:06
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CommieGIR posted:The only company that does not use rare earth metals in their generators is Enercon. It is a significant concern, as, well, they are called rare earth metals for a reason. I guess that makes gold a really really rare earth element. edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth's_crust - sort by abundance in crust (ppm) and look for Neodymium at 41.5ppm and see what is below it. hobbesmaster fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 16:12
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silence_kit posted:Well, instead of lazily speculating about rare earth metals, you could actually make an argument. What is it? This question is like asking why we don't swap out a internal combustion engine for horses, I really don't know how to make it any more clear
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Apr 29, 2015 16:14
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CommieGIR posted:The only company that does not use rare earth metals in their generators is Enercon. It is a significant concern, as, well, they are called rare earth metals for a reason. Just because a poster on the internet says that there is a concern doesn't mean it is a valid concern. How many hysterical articles on the internet are there which say "oh no, we are going to run out of x!" A lot of them get the details wrong, and give no sense of scale, especially with regards to photovoltaics, integrated circuits, and other electronics, where I know a lot about the manufacturing there and can evaluate the claims pretty well. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 16:14
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Palace of Hate posted:This question is like asking why we don't swap out a internal combustion engine for horses, I really don't know how to make it any more clear Lol, all you did was post a random article that you frantically google searched to make some kind of vague point, which actually concluded the opposite of what you wanted to conclude. Then, you gave a random number from the article, out of context about the energy cost of making a solar cell. I then did your work for you and put the number in context, and it wasn't alarming at all. Then you mumbled something about how solar cell manufacturing involves chemicals, and I asked more about it, and then, I never heard back from you. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:20 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 16:18
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silence_kit posted:Just because a poster on the internet says that there is a concern doesn't mean it is a valid concern. How many hysterical articles on the internet are there which say "oh no, we are going to run out of x!" A lot of them get the details wrong, and give no sense of scale, especially with regards to photovoltaics, integrated circuits, and other electronics, where I know a lot about the manufacturing there and can evaluate the claims pretty well. Actually rare earth metals used in the production of generators and copper used in the production of electrical equipment does make it a very valid concern. We've already discussed in this thread the viability of going totally solar or totally wind powered: Its not really viable. Its why we've all settled on Nuclear as the obvious choice, supplemented heavily with solar and wind.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:22
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silence_kit posted:Lol, all you did was post a random article that you frantically google searched to make some kind of vague point, which actually concluded the opposite of what you wanted to conclude. Then, you gave a random number from the article, out of context about the energy cost of making a solar cell. I then did your work for you and put the number in context, and it wasn't alarming at all. No, actually those things I posted say the same things everyone has been telling you this entire thread: wind, solar, and hydro energy generation have either reached their useful saturation point (ran out of rivers to dam without murdering peasants), or are so ridiculously resource inefficient that they aren't really worth considering as a primary source of future energy generation when compared to other methods
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Apr 29, 2015 16:22
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2MW of wind turbine uses about 900 pounds of neodymium and dysprosium. Total production of *all* rare earth elements is on the order of 140,000 tons annually. US production of neodymium is a whole honking 600 tons per year. http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:668091/FULLTEXT01.pdf http://www.techmetalsresearch.com/2009/03/braking-wind-wheres-the-neodymium-going-to-come-from/
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Apr 29, 2015 16:25
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Edit: ^^^^^ I'll look at that, thanks. Palace of Hate and CommieGIR, you are going to have to support your claims here. Judging from your couple of posts, you two aren't really the self-fashioned energy technology experts that you claim you are. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:32 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 16:30
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silence_kit posted:Palace of Hate and CommieGIR, you are going to have to support your claims here. Judging from your couple of posts, you two aren't really the self-fashioned energy technology experts that you claim you are.  This is like the guy who posted the thread about Sim City Microwave energy.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:34
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silence_kit posted:Edit: ^^^^^ I'll look at that, thanks. Money quote: quote:...wind turbines armed with permanent magnets require 0.7-1 ton of neodymium alloy for every megawatt (MW) of capacity. And a single Scanwind 3500 DL wind turbine with a 3.5 MW capacity, produced by a Finnish company called The Switch, needs more than 2 tons (equal to approximately 0.6t/MW produced) of neodymium-based (Nd-Fe-B) permanent magnet material for manufacturing...In order to achieve enough wind power based electricity supply for global from Wind, Water and Sunlight (WWS) system, and increase by a factor of more than 5 in annual neodymium world production would be needed, which is quite impossible to be realized for a long time even with new extraction along with recycling measures. Seriously, man, if you look at figures saying we'd need 1/10th of *global steel production* to do this and think "That sounds reasonable, it's only 10%" you need to think about it more.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:38
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Annex North Korea, a major rare earth deposit was discovered there recently.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:42
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