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Phanatic posted: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. Where have I claimed that I want to power the world on only windmills? CommieGIR posted:
All I'm asked is for someone to actually support the claim that the land usage of wind energy and solar PV is actually a problem. No one has actually answered the question, and instead they have brought up other possible drawbacks of the technology, which, when evaluated in context and using realistic numbers for what adoption rates of the technologies are predicted to be, don't appear to be that bad. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 16:43
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This is like the guy who posted the thread about Sim City Microwave energy.
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silence_kit posted:Where have I claimed that I want to power the world on only windmills? What is your proposed baseload?
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Apr 29, 2015 16:46
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If wind/solar can only meet a part of the demand, then why bother with them? At some point nuclear is going to have to be a major part of the equation to get electrical generation down to near zero carbon production.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:46
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JohnGalt posted:If wind/solar can only meet a part of the demand, then why bother with them? At some point nuclear is going to have to be a major part of the equation to get electrical generation down to near zero carbon production. There is a valid argument to offset nuclear production values with solar and wind, but solar and wind alone are not likely to be enough, that's all we've been saying.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:47
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JohnGalt posted:If wind/solar can only meet a part of the demand, then why bother with them? If the cost of wind and solar drops to be competitive with other sources without subsidy, then yeah, they should be used to power whatever fraction of the world's energy supply they are suitable for.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:53
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silence_kit posted:If the cost of wind and solar drops to be competitive with other sources without subsidy, then yeah, they should be used to power whatever fraction of the world's energy supply they are suitable for. read: about as much as is possible without requiring completely laughable amounts of storage capacity
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Apr 29, 2015 16:55
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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blowfish posted:read: about as much as is possible without requiring completely laughable amounts of storage capacity Does anybody have numbers on the Gansu wind farm? I see a lot of numbers about generating capacity, which is significant (around 5-6GW) but nothing about its land usage.
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Apr 29, 2015 16:57
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blowfish posted:The main reasonable objection to biomass is land use and conservation problems inherent therein. If you've ever been to a place with lots of people and lots of wood burning heating/cooking stoves you should know there's also the matter of air pollution via particulates.
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Apr 29, 2015 17:11
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blowfish posted:Annex North Korea, a major rare earth deposit was discovered there recently. I don't think that was really recent, it's been a known thing that northern Korea has assloads of mineable resources. Most of it just sits there because nobody wants to do business with them.
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Apr 29, 2015 18:14
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JohnGalt posted:If wind/solar can only meet a part of the demand, then why bother with them? At some point nuclear is going to have to be a major part of the equation to get electrical generation down to near zero carbon production. Because we don't have decades more to wait to start dealing with climate change. Sure, maybe nuclear will finally live up to its promise, but the magic wave of new nuclear reactors won't be online for at least 25+ years. Meanwhile renewables can provide carbon neutral electricity now and we can bring online new wind farms in a year or two, not decades. Solar is already making an impact on midday peak.
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Apr 29, 2015 18:30
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Trabisnikof posted:Because we don't have decades more to wait to start dealing with climate change. Sure, maybe nuclear will finally live up to its promise, but the magic wave of new nuclear reactors won't be online for at least 25+ years. maybe if we spent all this time and effort we're spending on these jerkoff renewables on nuclear reactor construction it would take less than 25+ years
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Apr 29, 2015 18:34
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Trabisnikof posted:Because we don't have decades more to wait to start dealing with climate change. Sure, maybe nuclear will finally live up to its promise, but the magic wave of new nuclear reactors won't be online for at least 25+ years. This doesn't make sense, though. You can bring on wind farms, but not on the scale needed to phase out coal/natural gas within a decade, and not with the scale of storage solutions necessary to deal with capacity factor related downtime. How many GW of wind farms can still be reasonably installed without massive infrastructure improvements? This kinda goes back to "plop wind turbines on farms": there isn't a sufficient grid infrastructure (at least in the US) to handle such a decentralized input so far from significant population centers. All the great wind resources of the great plains is not suitable to replace Pennsylvania coal plants right now. By the time infrastructure or suitable storage solutions come online, a fleet of reactors could be brought online. So I'd challenge your notion that a climate-change impacting level of renewables can be brought online within a year or two. It's incrementally growing, but not at the rate necessary. We don't have decades more to wait to start making >25% renewables realistic.
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Apr 29, 2015 18:36
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Palace of Hate posted:maybe if we spent all this time and effort we're spending on these jerkoff renewables on nuclear reactor construction it would take less than 25+ years I don't know how spending less money building wind turbines would make it cheaper and easier to future nuclear power stations. Unless you mean like forcing all the engineers working on renewables to work on nuclear or something. Pander posted:This doesn't make sense, though. You can bring on wind farms, but not on the scale needed to phase out coal/natural gas within a decade, and not with the scale of storage solutions necessary to deal with capacity factor related downtime. How many GW of wind farms can still be reasonably installed without massive infrastructure improvements? Nothing is going to replace coal/natural gas within a decade hope that helps. In fact, if we could get more natural gas online and less coal, that'd still be good. Your second point about the lack of US infrastructure is only true if we choose to stop investing in our grid. As Wind Visions lays out, we actually don't need to invest that much in the grid to support massive wind on the US grid. Wind Visions calls for historically average investment amounts until 2050. What's the timescale you're imagining it would take to increase the number of reactors in the US by 25%? Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 18:39
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Trabisnikof posted:I don't know how spending less money building wind turbines would make it cheaper and easier to future nuclear power stations. You are not going to phase out coal or gas with wind and solar dude.
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Apr 29, 2015 18:42
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CommieGIR posted:You are not going to phase out coal or gas with wind and solar dude. Not completely, but yes one can use all the renewables and phase out fossil fuels. NREL's RE:90 study shows that the engineering is more than feasible. The politics are of course not as feasible, but that's true for nuclear too. Besides, coal is so bad that any amount of coal wind offsets it is a good thing.
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Apr 29, 2015 18:47
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silence_kit posted: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. I did. I explicitly answered your question. Others have as well. It's a problem if you want to use only green sources of energy and simultaneously don't want to use nuclear power. It's not a problem if you're willing to combine wind, solar, and nuclear. quote: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. It's actually a massive amount of land and resources when compared to other sources. This is fine if we're using them sparingly. You're suggesting that we don't need to worry about land usage, which advocates for just using wind power for 100% of our energy needs, but that would require roughly a third of Earth's total land mass. That's untenable. quote:Does it? No one has actually answered this question. Everybody just posts random sources at me, none of which answer the question. If you'd actually read the posts that are directed at you then you'd realize that several people have answered this question already, myself included. Worldwide agricultural land area does not come anywhere close to providing the land area that you'd need for worldwide energy production from wind alone. That's why it's a supplemental power source. quote:It isn't really--it's dwarfed by that of current industry. 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. You want to increase worldwide steal production, an ecologically destructive industry, by 10%. That's not a small amount. That's a massive amount of loving steel. quote:Who said that I or anybody is committed to electrifying the grid only with wind energy? It's irrelevant. No one said that you were, but you did post this: quote: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. You're asking whether optimization of land and resources is even necessary. The answer is an enormous "yes" because not optimizing it would result in ecological devastation on an enormous scale. Not optimizing it would be akin to just building wind turbines everywhere and not worrying about the consequences. Your question was whether the land area required by wind power is an issue, and the answer that people keep giving you is "only if you want to use only solar and wind power". It's not an issue if we're building a lot of nuclear power and just throwing down wind turbines in specific locations. silence_kit posted: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, I guess you can stop shitposting now because no one in this thread has made that specific assertion. A few posters have said that we should focus our efforts on nuclear power so that we can get rid of coal power as fast as possible. Would you disagree with that, and if so, why?
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Apr 29, 2015 19:13
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Trabisnikof posted:Because we don't have decades more to wait to start dealing with climate change. Sure, maybe nuclear will finally live up to its promise, but the magic wave of new nuclear reactors won't be online for at least 25+ years. New reactors are currently being built as we speak. Also countries that aren't America exist and are also doing it.
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Apr 29, 2015 19:25
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Nintendo Kid posted:Also countries that aren't America exist
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Apr 29, 2015 19:28
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Trabisnikof posted:I don't know how spending less money building wind turbines would make it cheaper and easier to future nuclear power stations. Germany spends like 10-20 billion euros on renewables each year. Assuming we bungle reactor building as badly as the Finns, we would still be coal free by 2050 at that level of investment.
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Apr 29, 2015 19:49
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Nintendo Kid posted:New reactors are currently being built as we speak. Also countries that aren't America exist and are also doing it. And the reactors currently under construction as we speak won't make a dent in current national coal use, the same complaint about renewables. My knowledge is US-centric and because of the nature of energy, its too complicated to assume that something that works here in the US will work everywhere. So I don't make claims about other countries and that's why.
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Apr 29, 2015 20:18
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Trabisnikof posted:And the reactors currently under construction as we speak won't make a dent in current national coal use, Yes they will.
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Apr 29, 2015 20:28
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So when is coal expected to be getting expensive? Fuel and infrastructure being cheap is the only reason it's being used.
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Apr 29, 2015 20:33
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Lurking Haro posted:So when is coal expected to be getting expensive? Fuel and infrastructure being cheap is the only reason it's being used. Probably never? Like, most of it at least, because there's assloads of it around and much of it isn't even worth hauling more than a couple hundred miles away to export or just use.
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Apr 29, 2015 20:37
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Coal is only going to get expensive if the government adds the true costs of coal into the pricing. If energy consumers were actually having to directly pay the costs of the health and environmental effects of coal mining and burning it would become a very expensive way to generate electricity. But we don't like to actually include all costs in such things, rather just sort of dilute those costs to society in general. The solution to harmful externalities is dilution!
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Apr 29, 2015 20:51
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Trabisnikof posted:Because we don't have decades more to wait to start dealing with climate change. Sure, maybe nuclear will finally live up to its promise, but the magic wave of new nuclear reactors won't be online for at least 25+ years. What an utterly bizarre conclusion. You realize that according to scientists we need to reduce carbon use by x by y time but you are throwing out the only thing that can get us there in that timeframe because ~reasons~~~~. Like what does "live up to its promise" even loving mean, there's no vodoo magic to perform, the technology has existed for decades, the problems are solved. One of the biggest problems with it, ironically, are low information liberals preventing new research and plants to be built. They also don't take 25 years to build. Seriously if you talk about climate change and aren't a nuclear energy proponent you should be ashamed of yourself, you're beyond worthless to the cause. Renewables are a drop in the bucket and aren't going to do poo poo. Actually, that's not correct. In Germany, for example, renewable energy has literally made the environment worse because their pie in the sky optimism led to more use of coal and other fossil fuels. Lurking Haro posted:So when is coal expected to be getting expensive? Fuel and infrastructure being cheap is the only reason it's being used. Functionally never, so you can forget that. There's mountains of the poo poo. It's hard to understate how great they are as a fuel source when you ignore the downsides, they pack an incredible amount of energy into a tight space. Trabisnikof posted:And the reactors currently under construction as we speak won't make a dent in current national coal use, the same complaint about "renewables". Hahahahahahah, nuclear isn't going to make a dent but some fans spinning in the air will. What's with the intellectual dishonesty and inconsistency here? "Renewables" are fine on the local level in certain applications. They certainly are not able to replace coal in the timeframe you are talking about, they cannot even put a meaningful dent in in it. Nuclear can. What is the most obvious conclusion from this? Like this isn't even theory, loving France did this decades ago and yet people are still wringing their hands over atoms. What's funny is that "renewables" actually have tons of environmental downsides that nuclear doesn't. I've seen no convincing evidence whatsoever we should prefer "renewables" over nuclear energy- they cause more fatalities due to the distributed nature, they are more environmentally harmful, and so on. I'm putting "renewables" in quotes because the term is misleading, over any reasonable timeframe nuclear energy is renewable. Actually nuclear energy is currently more renewable than things like solar panels which require rare earth elements in their creation.
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Apr 29, 2015 21:23
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Baronjutter posted:Coal is only going to get expensive if the government adds the true costs of coal into the pricing. If energy consumers were actually having to directly pay the costs of the health and environmental effects of coal mining and burning it would become a very expensive way to generate electricity. But we don't like to actually include all costs in such things, rather just sort of dilute those costs to society in general. The solution to harmful externalities is dilution! Yeah like there's grades of coal out there that's around $10 to $30 a ton in normal trading, because it's so impure and thus gets you way less energy per ton.
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Apr 29, 2015 21:26
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QuarkJets posted:It's actually a massive amount of land and resources when compared to other sources. This is fine if we're using them sparingly. You're suggesting that we don't need to worry about land usage, which advocates for just using wind power for 100% of our energy needs, but that would require roughly a third of Earth's total land mass. That's untenable. Thank you for being the first person to actually answer my question instead of repeating propaganda and spouting vague platitudes. However I find your number (1/3rd of earth land mass?) hard to believe. Can you show your work? I get something more like 1% of earth land mass to generate enough electricity to power the world in 2011 using only windmills. The total area of farm and pasture land in the United States alone is like 3% of earth land mass. Again, I'm not suggesting that we power the world using only windmills, but this seems to suggest that we haven't really tapped out of places to put wind mills yet, given that they are compatible with pasture land and farmland. QuarkJets posted:If you'd actually read the posts that are directed at you then you'd realize that several people have answered this question already, myself included. Worldwide agricultural land area does not come anywhere close to providing the land area that you'd need for worldwide energy production from wind alone. I think that you are wrong. Show your work. QuarkJets posted:Well, I guess you can stop shitposting now because no one in this thread has made that specific assertion. Not true. Multiple people in the thread have made that assertion: blowfish and Palace of Hate both have.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:15
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tsa posted:I'm putting "renewables" in quotes because the term is misleading, over any reasonable timeframe nuclear energy is renewable. Actually nuclear energy is currently more renewable than things like solar panels which require rare earth elements in their creation. This is news to me. What rare earth elements are those? silence_kit fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 23:18
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silence_kit posted:This is news to me. What rare earth elements are those? Breeder reactors. Literally dig up nuclear waste and chuck it into reactors to power the Earth for a century or two, our current fuel cycle is missing out on 99% of the energy in the fuel. Mother Russia is building commercial scale breeders now by the way, so "it's completely untested outside of finicky research reactors" is not an argument any more. Rare earths for the generators in wind turbines were discussed a few posts up.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:27
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blowfish posted:Breeder reactors. Literally dig up nuclear waste and chuck it into reactors to power the Earth for a century or two, our current fuel cycle is missing out on 99% of the energy in the fuel. Mother Russia is building commercial scale breeders now by the way, so "it's completely untested outside of finicky research reactors" is not an argument any more. No no no, tsa claimed that solar panels require rare earth elements in their creation. As far as I know, the dominant solar photovoltaic technology, flat plate multi-crystalline or mono-crystalline silicon, requires heavy use of no rare earth elements.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:42
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silence_kit posted:Where have I claimed that I want to power the world on only windmills? For some ballpark numbers, check this out: http://www.entergy-arkansas.com/content/news/docs/AR_Nuclear_One_Land_Use.pdf Here is a more detailed study on wind land use requirements: http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy09osti/45834.pdf I found these on Google in about 2 minutes - you can probably find similar documents about solar land footprint. Let's do a quick back of the envelope exercise: the United States used 4,686,400,000 MWh in 2013. On average, that's 534.611 GW at any given time in 2013. If you take the number from the NREL report above of 34.5 hectares/MW (page 10), you're looking at 22,788,121 acres to meet half the US's electricity demand with wind. This is an area slightly smaller than the state of Indiana. Of course, this ignores other issues that people have mentioned for good reason - materials usage, varying capacity factors, grid infrastructure, and diminishing returns as you choose the best wind sites first and continually build on worse and worse ones. Also, energy demands continue to increase each year, so you're going to have to continually build generation capacity to account for that. It also ignores that the land isn't completely useless once there's a wind turbine built on it, such as the example of building on farms that you mentioned. Another thing to consider is that in many places, farmland may have low wind capacity factors, so you're going to have to build even more turbines to meet electricity demand compared to building them in optimal locations (which we're already doing, so this is considered to some extent in the hectares/MW number I used above). I think what people are trying to convey to you is that this is an absolutely massive amount of land and there would be substantial ecological costs to building millions of wind turbines covering this much area. Keep in mind that in the map linked by a previous poster, the best locations for wind are out in the middle of nowhere, so you also have to consider the immense amount of infrastructure that would be required to transport and potentially store that energy. Additionally I think they are trying to say: why use a source that has this much ecological impact when we, with current technology, can use a source that has a much smaller footprint and uses far less materials? You're asking us to prove that land usage is a problem with wind and solar, but it's missing the point. The point is that we should be trying to minimize our ecological impact with our energy generation sources, and I think that's a really important point that the question fails to consider. Phayray fucked around with this message at 23:51 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 23:42
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silence_kit posted:This is news to me. What rare earth elements are those? Powerful dynamos (and electric motors) to my knowledge, require high strength magnets, which use neodymium as part of their production process. You would be able to make functioning turbines without them, but they would likely suffer significantly reduced power output, and thus would require significantly more space, steel, and concrete. Neodymium is not especially rare, but it isn't mined on the same scale as other elements because its uses are comparatively few, so using a lot of it would require a lot more investment in mining it.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:45
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silence_kit posted:No no no, tsa claimed that solar panels require rare earth elements in their creation. As far as I know, the dominant solar photovoltaic technology, flat plate multi-crystalline or mono-crystalline silicon, requires heavy use of no rare earth elements. Going by the internet, crystalline silicon panels are expensive and difficult to produce, compared to thin film panels which are easier, but which use indium, gallium, and cadmium (not sure but I imagine those aren't produced in high volume). Thin film panels are less space efficient but more manufacturing efficient, apparently, so would likely be most suitable for carpeting the planet in solar panels, if you were inclined to try that. They also appear to be one of the primary fields of development for photovoltaic energy, so it is possible that some predictive models will be assuming use of them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 23:55 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 23:51
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Phayray, thanks for your post.Phayray posted:I think what people are trying to convey to you is that this is an absolutely massive amount of land and there would be substantial ecological costs to building millions of wind turbines covering this much area. Keep in mind that in the map linked by a previous poster, the best locations for wind are out in the middle of nowhere, so you also have to consider the immense amount of infrastructure that would be required to transport and potentially store that energy. Well, if the wind mills can be put on farmland and pasture land, the ecological cost is not a big deal. Yes, storage is a big issue with renewables, and limitations with storage technology, may ultimately put a cap on the % of electricity generated by renewables. I am willing to grant that. Your point regarding electrical transmission is noted.
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Apr 29, 2015 23:58
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OwlFancier posted:Going by the internet, crystalline silicon panels are expensive and difficult to produce, compared to thin film panels which are easier, but which use indium, gallium, and cadmium (not sure but I imagine those aren't produced in high volume). If crystalline silicon panels are expensive and difficult to produce, then why are they the dominant technology? 90% of all solar panels are silicon. CIGS (Cadmium, Indium, Gallium, Selenide) was a technology hyped up and supposed to compete with silicon, but never really panned out. Solyndra was a CIGS solar cell company. The manufacturing cost of a silicon solar cell isn't even the biggest cost of solar energy, so looking into ways to make less efficient solar cells which have lower manufacturing costs doesn't make much sense to me. A lot of the thin film solar cells like CIGS, CdTe, and organic cells almost necessarily have to be lower efficiency cells. It is almost always the case in semiconductor electronics that there is a tradeoff between material quality and ease of growth or deposition (material synthesis). Honestly, I think that a lot of the reason why is you hear about alternate material solar cells in popular science articles is because it gives chemists and material scientists an excuse to do exploratory research into the optical and electrical properties of new materials under the guise of solving a practical problem, not because it makes sense economically or technologically. silence_kit fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 00:13
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silence_kit posted:If crystalline silicon panels are expensive and difficult to produce, then why are they the dominant technology? 90% of all solar panels are silicon. CIGS (Cadmium, Indium, Gallium, Selenide) was a technology hyped up and supposed to compete with silicon, but never really panned out. Solyndra was a CIGS solar cell company.  That's the big thing: Most solar panels are in the lower quality category, even industrial level solar panels are not even in the top 10% of solar panel output. The biggest limiting factor to solar photoelectrics is their efficiency and lack of energy storage for long term usage. Any solar plant in the world effectively only has a ~6 hour peak solar output, and its usually in the middle of the day when peak power is not needed.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:30
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tsa posted:What an utterly bizarre conclusion. You realize that according to scientists we need to reduce carbon use by x by y time but you are throwing out the only thing that can get us there in that timeframe because ~reasons~~~~. Like what does "live up to its promise" even loving mean, there's no vodoo magic to perform, the technology has existed for decades, the problems are solved. One of the biggest problems with it, ironically, are low information liberals preventing new research and plants to be built. They also don't take 25 years to build. Its a myth that "low-information liberals" and public outcry are what is holding back the expansion of nuclear power. Nuclear power has been hobbled because it is loving expensive. While the ultimate cost per kWh can be very competitive, the initial investment and maintenance costs are staggering. Additionally, the time from when a new reactor design is submitted for approval and when it is actually up and running can easily span 10-20 years. These aren't unsolvable problems. If the cost of pollution and greenhouse gas emissions were not externalized, then the price per kWh of nuclear would be far better able to offset the massive initial costs. Better and more efficient management of nuclear plant construction, aimed specifically at a rapid expansion of nuclear capacity using a single reactor design, with government backing, would also help tremendously. Smaller, lower power, more modular reactors that can more easily be invested in and scaled up might also help. But these are hard things to do, and require massive political will and coordination. France is really the only country that managed to install large amounts of nuclear capacity 1.) quickly, 2.) economically and 3.) safely. And if you look at the shitshow that is the EPR, even they seem to have forgotten how to do that in the span of a few short decades. I am about as pro nuclear as it gets. I sincerely believe that, given the options available to us now, nuclear power is the only practical way we can significantly curtail greenhouse gas emissions on a scale large enough to make a difference, at a pace fast enough to make a difference. But I honestly don't see that happening any time soon. And its not because the Mr. Indigo Q Granolas of the world are up in arms about nuclear power--it's because it is very difficult to get these things funded, A.) in the first place, and B.) for long enough to actually see the project to completion. I mean if you look at the various Gen 3/3+ reactor designs--all of these were designed with the close coordination of nuclear regulatory agencies. They were designed to leverage as much existing knowledge and expertise as possible. They were designed to be simple to construct and maintain, safe, efficient, and economical. And they are all from the late 80's to 90's. Since then, only the ABWR has materialized into actual, working reactors, and only 6 of them, all in Japan, all constructed 10-20 years after the design was completed and approved. In the US The ABWR took over a decade to get finally approved by the NRC in ~1997. It took about another decade (till 2006) to secure partnership and funding to build any in the US. And after much lost time and treasure, the program was shitcanned in 2011. Not because of politics, but because it was turning out to be too expensive and investors pulled out. The UK's ONR approval process is just beginning, and is looking like a poorly managed mess so far. The AP1000 comes in at 2nd place, with 0 actual reactors but at least 4 reactors actually being built in Georgia and South Carolina, and at least some almost certainly to begin construction soon in China. All of these have had some significant delays and cost overruns. The APR took about a decade to be approved by the NRC, which was the first agency to recieve a submission for revewal. ONR approval is still ongoing, about 7 years in. The EPR is proving to be a clusterfuck. The first unit in finland began construction in 2005, scheduled to take 4-5 years. It is still under construction, has run into numerous difficulties, problems and cost overruns, and is estimated to be operational maybe in 2018, 13 years after construction began. Various other EPR projects are having similar delays and cost overruns. The NRC approval process was suspended ~8 years in, by Areva's request, because nobody wants to build these things in the US after the first few projects started looking like black holes of money and time. At one point two units were planned in the US, but those are now delayed indefinitely / cancelled. ONR approved the design in 2012. The ESBWR is a sort of newer and improved ABWR. It has no reactors planned or under construction and lags behind all the above three in the regulatory approval process, due to being newer. It was only just certified by the NRC late last yaer, after about 9 years of review. In all likelihood it will take at *least* a decade before finished construction of any of these is even possible, irrespective of whether or not anyone wants to fund them. I mention these reactor designs because they represent the industry's best effort to produce, as quickly as possible, designs that are conservative, rely on extremely well understood and well proven technology, cheap to construct and maintain, and easy to approve. And what we see is that it generally takes about a decade to get the reactor approved anywhere at all, up to another decade for it to be approved in other countries, and best case 5-10 years for the first few reactors to be constructed after regulatory certification, with most others following much later, if at all. We see that projects are often cancelled, sometimes after construction has already begun, for cost reasons. We see that projects routinely go over time and over budget, sometimes dramatically so. And this is with the 3 Gen3/3+ reactors that had the BEST shot at overcoming these problems. If we are generous and conservative, we need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by ~30% by 2030 to have any serious shot at stabilizing the climate. This would require us to at least double our installed and operational nuclear capacity in less than 20 years. In the last 20 years, we managed to sort of approve a few reactor designs in some places and kind of build* a handful of them maybe. So really making a dent using nuclear power would require at least an order-of-magnitude improvement in our ability to install new nuclear capacity, starting basically now. And that is totally disregarding the fact that many if not most existing nuclear plants will have to be decommissioned between now and 2030. Personally I see this as an insurmountable problem without unrealistically decisive and sweeping government intervention. If you have a rosier picture to paint, please chime in so I can sleep at night.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:34
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silence_kit posted:Phayray, thanks for your post. Also please consider a point noted in my post, that the number I used is based on current wind farms, which are built on optimal locations (the companies building them want the most bang for their buck, after all). If your only placement criterion is farmland, you're looking at much lower capacity factors and therefore many more wind turbines to produce the same amount of electricity. The ecological cost in this case is a big deal, because you're going to need a lot more than the estimated 10% of worldwide steel manufacturing capability, not just for the turbines, but the infrastructure as well (as I don't think this was factored into that number, though I may be wrong). The point is that, with your scenario, you're trying to minimize the ecological impact due to the turbine footprint, but there are other impacts to consider which are substantial. Increasing worldwide steel production by 10, 20, 30% just to build wind turbines is a big deal; that's a lot of material to mine, not to mention the energy costs associated with production. I'm interested in your answer to the question I alluded to at the end of my post: why go with this solution over the nuclear alternative, which will have a much, much smaller environmental impact? I'm just curious, and if you're asking just to get information or entertain a thought experiment, then that's fine and I hope I've been able to answer your questions.
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Apr 30, 2015 00:37
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Morbus posted:Its a myth that "low-information liberals" and public outcry are what is holding back the expansion of nuclear power. Nuclear power has been hobbled because it is loving expensive. While the ultimate cost per kWh can be very competitive, the initial investment and maintenance costs are staggering. Additionally, the time from when a new reactor design is submitted for approval and when it is actually up and running can easily span 10-20 years. The Green Party and groups like Greenpeace do the most damage, that and private enterprises that fail to heed warnings like TEPCO. The 1980s did a LOT of damage to the Nuclear Power movement. It doesn't help that while chemistry is generally covered in high school, nuclear basics are not covered until Chem II in college level classes. Even then, they don't go very far into actual basics behind a reactor. Not to mention the Coal and Oil Industry promoting Natural Gas and Coal as 'Job generators'
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Apr 30, 2015 00:38
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http://media.bze.org.au/ZCA-Stationary_Energy_Synopsis_20June10.pdf https://bze.org.au/zero-carbon-australia-2020 You can view my post history, I'm actually very pro-nuclear and believe it is going to form a core component of any non-fossil fuel energy mix in a carbon neutral world. However, to say renewables can't do poo poo is WRONG, so SHUT THE gently caress UP. Linked above is a plan for Australia* (however, I'm sure an equally possible plan could be developed for the US without much difficulty) for a completely renewable baseload. And a hell of a lot more research has gone into it than your un-sourced lovely opinions. *I am aware Australia is an order of magnitude more sunny than the US. This is not relevant. Do not bring it up. EDIT: Instead of arguing about why renewables are useless or can't do poo poo, why don't you discuss the current regulatory climate in the US towards Nuclear power? Or how about why there is still a limited up-take in renewables in your country? blacksun fucked around with this message at 00:44 on Apr 30, 2015 |
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Apr 30, 2015 00:39
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