Comment by epistasis
12 hours ago
I've had so many arguments with people that think replacing a continual supply of gasoline with solar panels and batteries means that we are just as dependent on the source of solar panels as we are on the source of gasoline.
It's hard for people to visualize the massive shift here. It's the difference between needing to eat every single day, to merely needing to buy a 5-year supply and never having to worry about eating again until 5 years from now.
Except that it's 30+ years for solar panels, 20+ years for batteries.
The amount of independence and security that renewables-based energy infrastructure provides is hard to imagine for most people. The US's two big inflationary events in the past 50 years have been due to global fossil fuel supply shocks. And the second one that happened in the 2020s was when the US was a net exporter of energy! We still had exposure to inflation shocks because we had a global market for our energy sources.
Renewables change all that. Even if we bought all of our solar panels and batteries from China today, we'd have far better energy security, and have decades to build up the industry to replace them if we wanted to switch to autarky. (And autarky is a terrible idea, but that's a different discussion...)
You also get 30 years of efficiency improvements and 20 years of capacity and reliability improvements when you replace them.
In practice: https://www.rte.ie/news/regional/2026/0116/1553440-mayo-wind...
>> "Each one of the new wind turbines will be capable of supplying more power to the national electricity grid than was generated by the entire Bellacorick wind farm."
It's funny, there was meme-like behavior a few years ago where anti-wind advocates would say "they're tearing down the wind farms before their end of life, like only 15 years in! Clearly wind doesn't work at all!"
And then you'd go and look at the details of any these "tear downs" and you find out that it's not because the current wind farm is failing, it's because turbine technology had improved so much that it made financial sense to drop in much bigger turbines right now, before their natural end of life.
Shortly after that, there started to be complaints about "what will we do with the waste from these massive wind turbine blades!?" as if they were in any way comparable in toxicity to the byproducts of fossil fuel extraction and burning.
It's so funny to see how shallow these anti-renewable talking points are. They all require that people spend zero effort and avoid critical thought in any way.
Well, in that case they’re also far bigger turbines (bigger than were available when the original project was built, granted).