Farva wrote:[quote="eldanielfire"][quote="Farva"]I’m confused. Solar panels are over 95% recyclable.
And you are completely and utterly wrong by discounting wind due to reliability. Ditto solar. Solar and wind are variable. We know that and design the systems to cope and compliment with things like BESS, PHES, green hydrogen (once prices get under control, conventional gas before then), etc.
A good solar panel has a 20-25 year lifespan. Cheap ones a 5 year one. SOlar panels can and do break. Their toxic chemicals, Cadmiun and chromium don't have a half life like nuclear waste, they'll be here forever in their toxicity and can leak into ecosystems, soil water and so on. Plus we have no plan to dispose of old and broken solar panels safely. Also certain to be dumped in poor countries. I'm not saying solutions and systems can't be found for these, but currently they haven't and they are problems that will only grow and grow. Likewise, Win energy is hugely destructive to wildlife and these solar and win arrays need huge clearance of land, damaging the environment hugely. The UK would need over 25% of it's land mass just for solar or wind turbines to power the country. Currently only 7% is covered in urban sprawl right now.
As for the battery tech to support these renewables, it isn't even close, the biggest solar battery array is Tesla's in Oz, it can max support 30,00 home for an hour.
Biofuels are an interesting one. For me, growing things to burn don’t add to the CO2 in the atmosphere. By growing things you take out CO2 and then add it back in to the atmosphere by burning. I do agree that there is an issue with monoculture and replacing other land uses with growing for energy.
So you agree.
WTE on the other hand doesn’t have many negatives. The waste will be produced anyway so by burning it we aren’t dumping it. And from a GHG perspective, waste depots drop a tonne of CH4 during their life so burning it means that isn’t emitted. CH4 is significantly worse than CO2 for warming.
I'm in agreement here. Bu ti's still not a carbon reducing technology in that it slows, not reverses the Global warming effect. There are also a lot of hypothetical, the practice when out into mass scale is never as efficient or as problem-less as the theory.
Likewise none of these green energy techs are yet, in reality, able to provide our needs. Wind and solar can only produce optimum energy at best 30% of the time in favourable conditions (But will produce some around 75% of the time). It is why China, while has a massive green energy tech is looking to invests in hundreds of massive coal stations.
There are some that are extremists. But most aren’t and painting the climate change movement as looney is dishonest.
And here is the problem. The Climate Change movement isn't looney (a term you brought up here). But parts of the environmental lobby are. The fact you said that misses the point. That's criticism, right or wrong, suddenly taken by the Environmental lobby as meaning you are attacking the movement or supporting the fossil fuel industry. You can't tell me suddenly declaring Michael Moore is supporting white supremacists and the far right is ridiculous.
The green lobby should be taking on these criticisms to refine the roadmap for a better environment for the future, instead, largely because they are increasingly tied to big corporate projects out for those sweet sweet massive government contracts and behaving increasingly like the Big Oil industry.[/quote]
I’ll step through these points one by one.
Firstly the idea of contamination. Solar panels are recyclable. They are, off memory, something like 97% recyclable. At the moment we haven’t hit economies of scale to make it cheap, but that can and should be legislated and considered as a part of the running cost of the plant.
Secondly, i am not familiar with any panel that has a life of only 5 years. All the tier one, who would make up 99% of panels installed, are warrantied for 10 years with a 25 year performance warranty. Short of the glass breaking they will be there over 25 years.
Third, they no doubt leach some heavy metals. But the volumes pale into insignificance when compared to any other form of generation. The ash ponds created by coal are ecological disasters. Nuclear waste, which is created in far higher volumes than any waste from solar, has a half life, but it’s long enough that for all intents and purposes it’s forever for us. Realistically solar should not leach out heavy metals unless there is a failure in storage and disposal. That can be legislated against as well with any cost bound in to the LCOE of the plant.
Using the Tesla big battery as an example of why storage doesn’t work missed the mark. It’s not designed for storage it’s designed for frequency control not load shifting. If you want storage a mix of batteries for instant response and PHES for load shifting when paired to variable renewables (solar or wind) has been shown by Lazard’s in the 2019 LCOE summary, which is the RE engineers handbook, is cheaper then new coal. That explains why RE made up something like 75% of new installed capacity in 2019.
In regard to China installing new coal, please be really careful on how much is actually going ahead. Most of the capacity quoted, and this goes for most places around the world, refers to projects that have licences. I can guarantee you from experience that maybe 1 in10 of those will go ahead. Developers get the licence and then determine that it isn’t feasible. However, China has large deposits of coal. That means they produce coal power quite cheaply and it remains a little more competitive compared to RE and storage. It is still more expensive. And that brings us to the next reason why some coal is still getting up around the world and that is the production capacity of factories to produce new solar panels and wind turbines. Demand is flying up and production lags as the factories take time to be expanded. There is now significant lead time with most of the large solar produces (Trina, JA, Jinko, etc) and wind producers (Vestas, Siemens/ Gamesa, Goldwind, GE as the big four). As production capacity increases, market share of wind and solar will increase. Many countries are getting to a penetration level where stability measures are needed in the grid as well and there is a lag in policy to allow these. There needs to be a mechanism to pay the infrastructure owners (such as Neoen with the Hornsdale Reserve that you mention earlier) or to install the TLs that can link RE to demand. It’s not a base load issue (which is largely a redundant term these days).
I agree with you on biofuels.
WTE doesn’t pretend to be technology that provides full supply across the grid. It offers a solution to a waste problem. And if it offsets coal And the methane from waste it certainly is a GHG reducing technology.
I totally agree with you that parts of the environmental movement are loopy (and I’ll use that word). My concern is that both your post and MMs film are not up to speed on where technology is. Equally ideology drives a lot of government decisions. You see this in the US, Australia, much of South America and large parts of Asia certainly. Leaders are not interested in short term disruption for long term good because they are interested in election cycles. Equally the lobby industry drives debate in many countries and the O&G industry has plenty of money to fund lobby groups. Finally SOTNs favourite topic, the culture wars, has a hand to play. There Is a significant political block with influence (money) who are climate change deniers / skeptics who want to ‘get one over the lefties’ and this is evident with nationalist governments elected in Brazil, the US, the UK, India, Russia, etc. To summarise that little distraction there is certainly a looney lefty group and that is a definite criticism. But it doesn’t affect the economics of the technology. What does affect the technologies is nationalist governments and misinformation.[/spoiler][/quote]
FFS!
We are here to have our entrenched views further supported, not to be fed facts which threaten them.
