Comment by Barrin92
6 years ago
I'm not sure about the resource costs of solar in particular but the question is a very salient one. Vaclav Smil has a great piece on this. "What I see when I see a wind turbine"
"the quest for renewable electricity generation. And yet, although they exploit the wind, which is as free and as green as energy can be, the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels. • Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.[...] For a long time to come—until all energies used to produce wind turbines and photovoltaic cells come from renewable energy sources—modern civilization will remain fundamentally dependent on fossil fuels."
Well we should ask this for every energy technology and fortunately people have done this. The term for this is energy return on investment (EROI) where solar has between 8.7 and 34 and wind between 10 and 20 (although other literature says 20 to 50). A value 1 means you get as much energy as you invested. So for solar that means you get your energy used for production back in 1 to 4 years.
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment
And the EROEI has been increasing, since one aspect of driving these technologies down their experience curves is reduction in inputs, including energy, needed to make them.
That’s just asking for a chicken and egg problem.
You can’t get fully renewable energy production until you can use EV trucks to deliver the windmills, and you can’t get clean EVs until you have windmills to power them. Sure, we currently burn some diesel to setup these windmills, but the alternative is to burn coal. Don’t let the perfect become the enemy of the good.
Also, who’s the ominous “they” above? Energy companies don’t setup power production out of spite; they setup energy production so we can have AC and TVs. We’re the consumers of all of that electricity, directly or indirectly.
Sounds like a bullshit purity test.
Yeah :) . They can't see those machines using electricity instead of diesels, they can't see steel making without atmospheric pollution, and same goes for cement.
I guess some people have hard times adjusting to some novelties. Their arguments don't stand, and they don't see that.
I was tremendously surprised recently by some of the clever work on making cement without CO2 emissions, starting exactly 60 minutes into this talk:
https://youtu.be/E76q-9q7ZDg
Standard hydrolysis for making (green) hydrogen from water using electricity also creates excellent chemistry for the cement process.
We must anticipate an era where there are periods of zero-marginal-cost energy so plentiful we can't use it all, followed by periods of undersupply. Storing electrical energy in hydrogen may seem completelt uneconomical right now, but combining that process with cement production could result in fantastic efficiency of process. We are going to need carbon-neutral cement somehow, and if we get hydrogen with it, and CO2 feedstock for other purposes, we may be in a really good position for all sorts of processes.
Industrial processes have been under examined as we try to become carbon neutral. That means that there's tremendous opportunity, not that it's impossible. Humans are clever when we are allowed to be, we just haven't put much innovative thought into our industrial processes in a long time, much less resigned then from the ground up!
There was a commercial for the Nissan Leaf about gas-powered everything: https://youtu.be/Nn__9hLJKAk
No, the author is just saying we're still a long ways away from the true final goal of using no fossil fuels.
It's not a bullshit purity test at all. It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are nominally 'green'. In some cases it's questionable if some green technologies actually are a net positive at all.
There is a strong 'abundance' bias implicit in articles by people like Ramez Naam, who push so strongly for green energy production because they don't want to consider the very obvious alternative, dematerialisation and reduction of energy consumption. People like Naam still categorically hang onto a growth narrative so they tend to neglect the downsides of the solutions they provide.
> In some cases it's questionable if some green technologies actually are a net positive at all.
This is just FUD, unless you actually have numbers that show CO2 emissions are higher over the lifetime of a solar panel compared to a coal power plant.
> don't want to consider the very obvious alternative, dematerialisation and reduction of energy consumption.
Forcing everybody into poverty is not a viable alternative.
> It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are nominally 'green'.
Ignored by whom? You?
In fact, embedded energy is a huge consideration in the evaluation of green technologies.
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> It highlights the extremely neglected costs in raw material and non-electrifiable infrastructure that is required to produce materials that are nominally 'green'.
Hey just because you haven't thought of them doesn't mean other people with much more knowledge and experience on the subject haven't.
I think you just don't like that your hairshirt and woe philosophy is not popular or necessary.
How about we ignore you and buy ever increasingly cheap and clean products that make our lives better?
> the machines themselves are pure embodiments of fossil fuels. • Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics. For a 5-megawatt turbine, the steel alone averages 150 metric tons for the reinforced concrete foundations, 250 metric tons for the rotor hubs and nacelles (which house the gearbox and generator), and 500 metric tons for the towers.
This is FUD. The mass of construction materials pads the quote but is not a useful measure of environmental impact.
Vaclav Smil is looking at this all wrong. There are three phases here
1) power is produced by plants that take fossil fuels to build and fossil fuels to run
2) power is produce by plants that take fossil fuels to build and no fossil fuels to run
3) power is produced by plants that were built using renewable energy and run off of it too.
Most of the people who focus on phase 2 basically want us to stay on fossil fuels forever, but they don't want to come out and say it.
> Most of the people who focus on phase 2 basically want us to stay on fossil fuels forever, but they don't want to come out and say it.
How do you know this? Serious question.
Because if you leave out the first and third phases, then there is no reason to develop renewables and get off of fossil fuels. And if that was not what they thought, they should say it, but they don't.
But let me ask you the question, what is your position on global climate change and renewables? Do you believe global climate change is real, caused at least considerably by human fossil fuel emissions and dangerous? Do you believe we should be replacing fossil fuels with renewables?
And what do you think of my three phase analysis?
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This seems a little silly - of course to develop future technologies we need to use existing technologies.
Imagine debating using an abacus to develop a computer - "ah but we must remain pure to the hopes, dreams and philosophies of what the computer aspires to be." Yeah, ok. I'll be over here funding wind turbine companies, you can debate the merits of the methodology and strategies of funding green tech with petroleum-based products yourself. Sounds a little boring to me.
I don't understand your comparison at all. Given that the primary problem that a wind turbine seeks to solve is environmental, the environmental costs in making the turbine have to be considered.
There's no relationship to computers here, it's not a question of philosophical purity, but of correct evaluation of the costs and benefits of a technology.
> the environmental costs in making the turbine have to be considered.
Of course it is considered, and few short decades ago that was a valid counterargument. Not anymore - and not later, given the pace of development in efficiencies and breadth of applications.
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Ok, let's brainstorm - how do we build wind turbines without the 150 year history of industrialization, accumulated knowledge of how to build real, physical things that accomplish the goals of 100% renewable energy? I'm all ears. Maybe I'm missing something - always happy to hear solutions to real, extant problems.
> Given that the primary problem that a wind turbine seeks to solve is environmental
That's ridiculous. The problem 'building a wind turbine' seeks to solve is "How do I turn this money into more money".
In market societies (eg most of the west) functionally speaking, the % of 'green power' delivered by environmental projects is a rounding error; it's essentially all delivered by people with capital attempting to obtain more capital.
How does it compare the environmental costs of all the materials, equipment, research and degradation related to fracking and ocean drilling?
So are you saying that we should abandon renewables, and stick with fossil fuels until a truly green energy technology is invented, sometime in the future?
And if that is not what you are saying, then what exactly do you think we should be doing today?
Cut down on the energy we expend, minimize the amounts of materials we use, focus on technology that consumes less energy rather than just attempting to make more of it in marginally less dirty fashion and so on.
Instead of promoting electrical cars which consume vast amounts of materials and still run on a dirty energy mix cut down on the car reliance altogether, for a trivial example.
As somebody who advocates a lot for my local government to finally, please please allow people to build housing in ways to merely allow people to choose to drive less, I think you are looking at this all wrong.
Even if we went back to early days of energy use, we are burning wood (or worse) and that is going to make for a truly ugly air quality.
Nobody wants to use X amount of energy, they actually want to accomplish Y amount of energy services. Current tech has X about four to five times as Y. As we electrify, it enables tech to get X very close to Y. But we also get to use cleaner energy as we electrify.
If my government won't even let me reduce Y for those people that want to, then the idea of forcing everybody to drastically reduce Y, and leaving the X factor the same, will be truly disastrously ineffective.
I think that in the 1970s, this idea was far more reasonable. But as we have failed to make any progress on reducing the amount of energy services that people want, but we have made tons of progress in reducing the X factor, and in cleaning up energy generation, I no longer see it as a feasible or fruitful path.
>Instead of promoting electrical cars which consume vast amounts of materials and still run on a dirty energy mix >cut down on the car reliance altogether, for a trivial example.
I see, so you think people should abandon autos and instead use buses that run on fossil fuels, or trains that run on electricity made from fossil fuels. Forever. And of course let's not forget the fossil fuel that will be used in constructing all those new buses and trains. So it seem like you want us to stay on fossil fuels.
And if that is not your plan, then what is?