Comment by DrBazza
2 days ago
Can anyone point me a genuinely unbiased comparison of solar, wind, coal, oil, nuclear and hydro, in a reputable scientific journal that covers all of the 'criticisms' that are raised for some but not others?
There's at least:
- creation of infrastructure
- maintenance of infrastructure
- mining/acquiring fuel
- waste fuel
- retirement of infrastructure
and then for each point:
- something like cost per MWh,
- human deaths,
- animal deaths,
- CO2 emissions
- land area usage (or land area damage)
- others???
Oxford University's Our World in Data collates this kind of thing from reputable sources.
What are the safest and cleanest sources of energy?
https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
Low-carbon technologies need far less mining than fossil fuels
https://ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-technologies-need-far-...
Why did renewables become so cheap so fast?
https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth
I've looked at these before, and the charts are nice, but I feel like there's a better way of displaying the data in some sort of matrix.
Some of the graphs have options to switch to multiple comparisons, or to log scale and similar. They often have table formats and allow you to download the data for your own use.
This is an active area that is exceedingly difficult if not outright impossible to do.
The nature of any project is inherently fractal, and trying to assign a impact to each part is all over the map, and anyone with any agenda or bias can move the 1000 little sliders enough that it adds up to what they ultimately want to see.
You get stuff like:
"Lets assume all the trucks are old and need to drive up hill to deliver the panels"
"Lets assume that the solar panels are installed in a place where it never is cloudy"
"Lets assume the coal plant only burns coal from this one deposit on earth that has the lowest NOx emissions"
"Lets assume the solar panel factory never bother putting panels on their roof, and instead run on coal"
On the other hand the points I listed are sufficiently coarse grained and the cost or expense of most of those can be estimated.
Deaths due to coal mining? Probably in the hundreds of thousands. Animals killed by oil slicks? Millions. Deaths due to fossil fuels via climate change? Millions. Animals (and people) killed by solar? Statistically insignificant in comparison.
The repeated cost of 'trucks driving up a hill', and the cost of fuel for those lorries, and so on, is indeed 'fractal'. However the oil consumed by a power station dwarfs that.
Strip mining thousands of square miles for coal, or steel, or rare-earths, or simply just 'square miles' to bury old wind turbine blades, is very much quantifiable.
And these are all the kinds of points that are used to denigrate one form of power 'I don't like', but aren't talked about for other forms 'I do like'.
Hence my original question, a like-for-like comparison in a reputable scientific journal.