“Suddenly”? This has been an obvious trend for many years. Anyone paying even cursory attention to the cost curve of renewable energy could see this was coming.
Basically my conclusion (in amidst a lot of embarrassingly arrogant stuff) was that maybe silicon PV was going to get a lot cheaper, because I looked long and hard for any fundamental cost floor within an order of magnitude or so of where we were, and I couldn't find one. But even if silicon PV didn't, there were several plausible alternative technologies that could move in to fill the gap.
As it turned out, silicon PV is now about 20 times cheaper than it was then.
Sorry, this is off-topic, but: it looks like you wrote on average a page or more of personal notes every day for 10 years, and then... put it all up on github?
This is extremely fascinating to me. Why? Was it worth the effort?
Something tells me that if solar continues this decline (which is obviously much more difficult now) and achieves another 80% drop in price, it is possibly the biggest solution to most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population (which lives in tropics).
The oligopoly of energy industry by OPEC, Russia and few other countries has possibly impacted geopolitics more than anything else. The fights of today and future might all be about intellectual property on everything new and shiny that is discovered.
I think you're being unrealistically optimistic, despite your extremely dystopian last sentence. People will continue to create suffering through ignorance, delusion, greed, and hatred even in the face of abundant energy—OPEC was founded in 01960, at which point the previous 50 years included the Holocaust, the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward and the greatest famine in history, the Rape of Nanking, the worldwide rise of Fascism, two World Wars, the Bengal Famine of 01943, de-kulakization, the establishment of GULAG, the Great Depression, the first nuclear war, the destruction of Königsberg, the 01918 flu pandemic, the First Indochina War, the Chinese civil war, the Armenian genocide, the last 18 years of the American Indian boarding schools, the death marches of the Palestinians, the Partition of India, and some other incidents.
Energy became immensely cheaper after Watt, and all of the above events happened in the world thus created. Making energy cheaper still won't solve most of the world's major problems impacting most of the world population.
It’s a movement that thinks that adding the extra 0 gets people to think on a longer time scale. I don’t happen to think it’s a useful trick because we’re not even thinking on thousand-year timescales and a lot of us experienced the turn of the millennia.
It's a meme for Long Now members showing that they intend/expect civilization to continue past the year 9999. It's an effective signal to other members and a great "Ask me" button.
Meta (since it’s your site): 26px is waaaaay too large a font size for body text; I zoomed out to ⅔ before it was comfortable. Even with a comparatively small font like you’re using, I’d say never go past 20px, and I’d suggest 18px as a better upper limit (only to be applied on larger-than-mobile devices, too). Also since I’m writing, I strongly recommend against adjusting letter-spacing except for in all-caps text. (You’ve spaced headings out.) It just makes text uglier and harder to read; the designer did it the way they did for a good reason in almost all cases.
You're welcome to reskin Dercuano with a different stylesheet that you like better! You might have better taste than I do. I hope I get a chance to see it!
By 2020, they finally came around to recognizing that solar and wind are really happening. But they still think coal consumption will increase in China.
Nuclear provides 20% of our power today and would have provided 100% of our power today if we hadn't stopped building in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace.
Congrats to solar on reaching 3% of our energy mix. I'm genuinely glad that science and industry finally figured out clean energy that met the approval of environmentalists. I don't think the billion or so tons of extra CO2 spent waiting for cheap solar were worth it, but what's done is done and we just have to live with the consequences.
It does? I'm not finding any citations that support that. The largest figure I'm seeing is ~ 10%
> ... and would have provided 100% of our power today if we hadn't stopped building in the 80s and had merely kept up the pace.
Well if we'd embraced solar + wind + storage systems in the 80's or earlier, we'd be 100% solar / wind by now. Academic counter-factuals are often equal parts fascinating and depressing.
You might be defining "our" differently. You're correct worldwide. The GP is probably correct if they're talking of their home country. Only 30 countries in the world have any nuclear powerplants, with a median of about 20%. e.g. US and Russia are at that level.
I couldn't read the article, it said I'd reached my free limit.
But the reason I remember people saying the trend would plateau is because while the solar cells themselves can get cheaper, they questioned if the installation could.
Kind of reminiscent of Amdahl's law.
So I'm wondering if that proved not to be the barrier people thought.
What I've heard from some friends in the installation industry is that their work is dominated by large installation projects that will become huge money-makers for the owners in a reasonably short time frame, so it's worth the big up-front cost.
The panels are quite expensive and the labour is not cheap, but when you're installing 50-100+ panels on a big box store roof, it seems the economics far more than works out, at current energy price and subsidy levels.
This has been clear for a while. The real challenge for grid operators at the moment is system security - we need sufficient storage to ensure that supply and demand are consistently balanced.
I think what people fail to see is that renewable is not just solar or just wind or just hydro. It is a mix of these that will get us there. Each has pros and cons and we need prices for the whole group to come down. And they are, at a very sharp rate. Just that it may not be visible in every part of the world.
I am very hopeful that our grids will be powered by a mix of renewables that cover most hours in a 24 hour cycle with some mix of energy storage.
Also, as individuals, we are buying more of our own generation and storage needs, which I feel is great for reaching to places that the grid has not be able to.
I just signed up for amberelectric.com.au (no connection other than satisfied customer). Where I live we have a wholesale market that bids every 30m and a retail market that basically provides a fixed kWh price to consumers, with a maximum rate set by the government.
Amber provides consumption (and feed-in) at the wholesale rates, with a fixed $15/month fee.
The price is mostly at the AUD 0.10 - 0.20 / kWh during the day currently (its winter here) and as of right now (16:00 AEST), it's showing that 40% of the source is renewables (on a cloudy day)
The price has peaks at 07:00-09:00 and 17:00-19:00 and the renewables drop when the sun goes down, but on average wind days, it drops to ~20% from 40%.
Household solar is booming in Australia, to the point where governments are now rebating battery storage instead of solar panels, because the grid can't handle the inflow during solar peak. It's almost at the point where it would be worthwhile to have a household battery that uses grid energy during the day to charge.
In the meantime, our federal government wants to spend AUD660m on an unneeded gas peaker plant that is estimated to only be needed 2% of the time.
I work at a power company and while it can be cheap, in places like the Midwest, it's very unreliable. Solar? On average were budget for getting 10% max power generation out of single sided panels and about 25% for double sided. Wind? Prone to malfunctions and can get wrecked during tornados. But on good days they do well. Aside from that, still very unreliable when you have 5mph winds on a Friday night when energy need is at its highest.
Renewables got a long way to go. Storage is barely feasible right now and is the largest reason why it just can't work. This isn't a "Debbie downer" speaking here, these are facts. Green energy cannot support the infrastructure we've created right now. We could revert society to adapt to needing less power, but you're more likely capable of overthrowing the US government than have people be okay with using 30% if their max power usage nowadays.
You can generate at least 50% of the electricity with hardly any storage at all, more if you integrate heat and transportation in the network. The world is very far from the levels of renewables were storage is strictly necessary, which is why there is not very much storage being built right now.
There is no real need to reduce energy consumption. We have plenty of space to build solar panels and wind turbines. But primary energy consumption will naturally go down a bit when you replace ICEs (30% efficient or so?) with EVs (80% efficient or so?) and oil and gas heaters with heat pumps (2
4 times as efficient). Of course electricity consumption will be way larger.
My source is the German Wikipedia [1], that claims up to ca 60% with sufficient integration, and the fact that Germany managed 50% renewables in 2020 [2] without grid scale battery storage. To be fair, we could rely on the European grid to act as a sort of battery, which is why we managed such a high percentage with very little of the systems integration that the Wikipedia suggests one should do in this phase of the energy transformation.
I think this is why some countries (China, Russia, and some EU countries) continue to invest in nuclear power for base load. Solar/wind power are great where they are viable, but that’s not everywhere (yet)
Edit: to be fair, the US is still investing in nuclear just not at the “expansion” scale for the most part. Only one new reactor in construction rn.
>On average were budget for getting 10% max power generation out of single sided panels and about 25% for double sided.
Well, yes. It's a panel that only generates power when sunlight is shining on it. When the sun goes down, solar stops producing power.
Switching all power generation to PV solar is going to require massive overprovisioning. This has been obvious, and widely known, for decades. Cost-per-KWh is going to be widely variable during the day. This has also been known. Running an aluminum smelter at midnight is going to stop being economical.
We can either do this, or pay to raise every building and road in Miami by 6 feet. One or the other.
The mechanism we use is markets: the energy is put for sale, and bought by those who have some use for it.
High-carbon energy comes with an externality, CO2 emission, which doesn't depend on the use to which this energy is put.
There is an obvious solution to this: make high-carbon energy expensive, and use the Pigovian tax to subsidize installation of more renewable energy. The coal plants can pay for their own obsolescence, win-win.
Bitcoin is a complete distraction from this goal. If the price of energy doubled everywhere, overnight, and the market price of Bitcoin stayed perfectly level, Bitcoin's energy use would halve also.
So if you make high-carbon energy expensive, and renewable energy cheap, Bitcoin miners will use the renewable stuff instead. Indeed, to a significant degree this is already what happens.
What worries me is if crypto miners and crypto buyers, whose belief in cryptocurrencies is closer to a religion, would progressively lock more and more of these renewables for mining.
Now it's still 0.5% of the world's electricity production. What would prevent it for jumping to 30% in a few years?
In your assumption, the bitcoin market price stays level. But it can double or triple quickly, and peak for short intervals of time, or stay high. All because of the belief of bitcoiners. That's all just a huge socio-psychological problem.
This is just the 'lump of labor' fallacy applied to energy. Any demand induces more supply, and since Renewable Energy Is Suddenly Startlingly Cheap this new supply will mostly be renewable energy.
Again, this isn't about Bitcoin, it applies to any economic growth which consumes energy. Right now it's good, because, quite aside from the fact that useful and valuable things are done with that energy, it induces the market to supply more renewable energy, which further drives down the price of solar panels and windmills, in a virtuous cycle.
We're in no danger of running out of economically valuable wind and solar sites, any time soon. The only limiting factor is customers with money in their pocket and the desire to buy electricity with it.
There are only two things we can do to make this process faster: buy more electricity, and tax polluting power plants. Bitcoin can only do one of these things.
As an aside: if Bitcoin was 60 times as valuable (the implication of your jump from 0.5% to 30%), it would have a market cap of 44 trillion dollars. That's simply not possible as an act of religious faith; that would conclusively prove Bitcoin's value as sound money.
If I create a religion saying that the only worth purpose in life is to own one of my drawings, and then I make 10 of them, and then I get the whole Earth population to believe this religion, my drawings will have an unbounded market cap too.
That does not make them "proving value as sound money", only it shows that they are very desirable, but what it does not reveal is that the reasons behind it are irrational.
About the bitcoin as an "incentive for more renewable", wouldn't all the catastrophes present and future provoked by the global warming be a sufficient incentive? Why would adding random usages of energy change anything?
If you mean that the price of the bitcoin is thus limited by a ceiling, hopefully not far from the current value, and if you are right, I would be reassured, for sure.
Only, it's the complete opposite of the story told to us, in the internet media, about a bitcoin that will always eventually climb yet another order of magnitude...
Your comment let's suggest that you think that the price of bitcoin depends on the cost of energy used, while it it the opposite: the amount of energy used depends on the price of bitcoin.
So with cheaper renewable, all other things staying equal, the price of bitcoin will not change, but the energy use will increase.
It doesn’t matter whether the production of renewable energy is cheap as long as it cannot be produced on demand.
A lot of people seem to think that market prices are determined by production costs but that isn’t the case.
Market prices are determined by supply and demand and that’s where renewables (except for hydro power) are very bad at.
This is why Germany has the highest electricity prices worldwide. Because it has a large share of wind and solar meaning that a large portion of the electricity is not supplied on demand:
I agree with pricing being dependent on supply and demand. But I do not think Germany is a good example.
I love Germany for many reasons and have lived there but pricing is not one of these reasons. Cellular, home Broadband, 4G LTE, Bank fees, that weird radio tax, and just about everything that is run by corporations is expensive compared to many other nations.
Are energy prices higher in every country that has more renewable sources than not?
Pretty obvious that if you have a very low variable cost to produce a product (electricity), then you can bid the lowest price to the market (so long as the fixed costs are reasonably similar in the long run).
If this is due to solar, though, this is some kind of perverse market malfunction—somebody's getting paid to keep their solar farms turned on and pumping power into the grid even when the grid operator is having to pay someone else to burn it up. Negative LMPs can be real with coal or nuclear generation, because their ramp times are measured in hours or even days, so you can't just turn them off at night when you don't need them. But the ramp time of a PV panel is about 100 nanoseconds. Short the panel out with a MOSFET (or, more dangerously, open-circuit it) and it stops producing power in under a microsecond. There's no fundamental reason for PV to drive prices negative.
As battery/storage deployment improves, this will balance out. Imagine a bunch of plugged-in EVs and home batteries ready to charge on demand in the middle of the day, etc...
South Australia has been trialing that exact idea with smart wall sockets and grid connected devices. One such device is a grid aware hot water heater. If you will need the hot water at night or in the morning it doesn't matter when you heat it initially.
Right, but we're talking about evolution of infrastructure. Putting plugs at parking spots is extremely cheap, and in fact is happening already basically everywhere.
I'm waiting on a good answer to the end-of-life disposal issue. I've only heard a vague "it's worth it overall", but I'd rather not see the mined minerals be lost.
What specifically are you waiting on? It's not hard to find information on the recyclability on PV cells (e.g. [1]). They're eminently recyclable, although they're mostly made of glass which isn't exactly high-value.
Particular policy isn't going to be a global discussion, it's going to be jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction, and will likely follow similar lines to all recycling discussion. PV cells aren't made of especially rare minerals, so it's not likely to be a high-priority issue. That's perhaps disappointing, but given that's our default for pretty much all recycling, it's no great reason to worry about one particular technology.
You might be waiting for a long time. While solar panels are rated for 20-30 years, there is some evidence that they can last much longer. And considering the vast majority of panels in existence today have been manufactured in the last 5 years, it will be quite a while before recycling panels is a major concern.
Great! I hope we do make big investments in renewable sources of electricity. But this article glosses over two biggish issues:
- we can’t rely on intermittent power source without grid scale batteries (which we don’t cheaply have)
- fossil fuel land use is exaggerated since it is double counted (e.g. you might drill for oil on a farmed field) and since it can be cheap, remote land. Solar land use is usually single purpose and near the users (so typically more expensive/useful land).
I don't think the "usual" patterns of solar will hold in the future. The article's example of a solar farm in the Australian outback, with undersea cables running to Singapore, pretty dramatically undercuts your second point.
Singapore to Darwin is about 2000 miles. For reference, that's comparable to Chicago to LA. That's at least an order of magnitude larger than what I'm used to thinking about for transmission.
It turns out that if you want to drive your transmission loss down, you need to run at (substantially) higher voltage. This is predominantly driven by resistive loss because your transmission wires aren't perfect conductors, as well as corona loss which scales with voltage.
has some stats on stats on line losses. At 765 kV (this is 50x what you'd see on a local transmission line), with the best cited figure (circa 2007) of 0.5% loss per 100 miles, you'd see about 10% loss over 2k miles. That's not great, but it doesn't actually seem horrible -- if you're producing 2x the power you need anyways, then you're still delivering a huge surplus.
China has recent laid a bunch of very long high-voltage DC cables to transport power west to east. None of them are underwater, but it sure seems possible.
Yeah. China has one comparable line (Xinjiang-Anhui / Zhundong–Wannan) which is 3300km running at 1100kV. I can't find any concrete numbers on line loss there, but I would expect if the voltage is 40-50% higher, keeping all else equal, you'd see a 2x reduction in line loss, so close to 5%.
(Of course, this doesn't account for last-mile delivery, or AC/DC conversion losses. But the limiting factor isn't the technology, at this point.)
It's certainly interesting, especially their 1100 kV lines. But what matters is cost; China is building a lot of new coal capacity so it's not like renewables + HVDC is a slam dunk.
That is at best in research and at worst a moonshot idea. Moving electricity long distance is rarely done today (again, not trying to say it cannot be done... just saying this is not a trivial thing where all we need is better govt cooperation as the article implies)
> - we can’t rely on intermittent power source without grid scale batteries (which we don’t cheaply have)
.. for domestic users, behind the meter storage is fast becoming compelling.
I had (with local subsidies) AUD $7,000 worth of panels installed earlier this year, and generate an average of 2.5 more power than I consume. A $10,000 battery system probably cover my domestic usage for all but the most rare run of cloudy days. That second figure's on a downward trend, too, especially as flow storage and other battery technologies start to benefit from the scale-up.
I made this point because (I thought) TFA was saying all we need is better government policies, but we also need cheap storage and long distance transmission (which are hard/expensive). Your example shows that the storage cost is still on the order of the cost of panel installation, and you live in a very sunny place so probably use the battery less than average (I’m guessing based on AUD).
Well, here in AU we definitely need better government policies - as our current administration is hellbent on coal and gas, and penalising renewables. As per the story linked in TFA, written by two former AU prime ministers, the reasons for this aren't hard to identify.
Depending on panel capacity and storage size, then yeah, you may find they align - but it's all a tradeoff. My point with those numbers is that for a reasonably small cost (compared to say the capex of a house build, which is the time these things should be installed) you can get very close to self-reliance in terms of electricity, at least at a residential scale, so we're not all held up by grid-scale storage systems. Commercial consumers of electricity tend to have predictable cycles, and therefore their baseload is much easier to manage.
It sounds like you have a somewhat fanciful idea of what fossil fuel production means. Usually it means 5-10 acres get scraped flat. PV isn't going to take anywhere near the amount of land that has been wrecked for oil, gas, and coal.
You can put solar panels on roofs, above highways or farmland. You can even put them into windows. But I agree that single use solar power plants are probably more efficient.
Your first point seems to be an actual but manageable problem though.
There are also studies that show that solar panel above fields can help boost production of both: solar panel get cooled by the plant perspiration and the plant get cooled by the shade of the panel.
I'm sure some would appreciate the shade. Most "free-range" chickens actually live in big enclosed warehouses so they might appreciate some fresh air under solar panels.
Believe it or not, one of the problems deserts have for growing plants is too much sun.
Or rather, too much sun for available water. Installing solar panels high enough that goats don't bump into them, and planting shade-tolerant arid plants, can absolutely support grazing.
Some grasses grow with partial light. With the right inter-panel spacing, could it be that a grazing animal might require more space, but not to an unreasonable degree? (I assume there are other considerations for the pasture...ease of finding the animals, moving them around, etc)
And while I'm thinking about it (and I'm way out of my depth here), but sunlight is a lot more powerful than growlights, is it not? Could power be siphoned to an extent, to supplement growth?
Registration process is broken. Upon entering the email, it sends me a mail link in which leads to the same page, and it again asks to register. Tried that loop twice... Hard to imagine such a big publication's website to be simply broken with no way to register.
In California at least, the reality is it's still a luxury for the rich, i.e. landowners, property owners.
I currently rent an apartment and a car and neither are clean energy, as much as I'd like them to be. No amount of protest will get my landlord to install solar panels on the roof, considering they won't even fix a smoke detector for 3 weeks; asking property management for an EV charging solution results in no response; EVs also haven't come out with a subscription or cost-effective long term rental model yet.
> asking property management for an EV charging solution results in no response
California has a law requiring your landlord to allow you to install an EV charging station if you want it.
It's out of your pocket, and doesn't really seem attractive to me as a renter to "invest" in a space I'm only renting. But if you're a long term renter and really want to make the EV switch, you are allowed to do so.
What are the typical costs for installing something like that, including the tax breaks I would get? (I can't assume there's multi-kilowatt power lines near the parking lot.)
In Texas I had a 100 amp sub panel with two 50 amp 14-50 receptacles on a 60’ run for about $1000 in a suburban home. A good outdoor rated charging box would run another $500-1000 or so depending on features. If I were a landlord I would request tenants have a service run specifically for the charger so it could be billed independently.
I imagine gross prices are slightly higher in California due to permitting.
In Minnesota, I paid an electrician less than $400 to install a 40amp breaker and run 6awg wire from my basement to the garage (maybe 20ft?) into a new outlet. I purchased my own level 2 charger and mounted it myself (another $600 at the time).
30% of electricity in New York State comes from hydro/renewable, and another 30% from nuclear.
25% of all energy consumption is from nuclear/hydro/renewable, counting all forms of fossil fuel.
That said, natural gas is far and away the largest fossil fuel source of energy. There's no truth to the saying that electric cars are coal powered, around here.
Do you think that solar panels on the roof are as efficient as centralizing them?
You can buy electricity from a particular supplier; electricity in my apartment in Brooklyn is more than half from nuclear, about 20% hydro/solar.
Rooftop solar panels are less totally efficient, but more resilient than the centralized case. As everybody knows, efficiency × resilience ≤ 1, alas. For resilience and reliability, you have to have some slack.
In California, PG&E is ridiculously expensive and generally hostile toward homeowners. Heck, they even blow up city blocks and burn down cities on a regular basis.
Anything that bypasses them is probably more efficient than working with them.
Putting solar panels on the roof of an apartment building won't do much for each individual living in it. You need grid-scale solar, and that is now super cheap. In California, more than half of power generation comes from hydro, nuclear, and renewable sources and has for several years now.
In the Bay Area, with PG&E at least, you can trivially choose your mix, and designate that you want only renewables. Perhaps this is pure accounting trickery, and it's essentially just making the remaining mix dirtier, but it's at least incredibly easy.
Another alternative for apartment dwellers, though I don't know if there are many options in CA, is Community Solar, where you buy a share of a utility-sized installation.
> In the Bay Area, with PG&E at least, you can trivially choose your mix, and designate that you want only renewables.
For renters, that'll largely depend on if you get an individual PG&E bill. Large apartment buildings aren't always individually metered. Instead, you pay a calculated portion of the building's single energy bill alongside your rent. (Referred to as RUBS--ratio utility billing system--in the multifamily housing space.)
There are a few things that might have a positive effect on this:
- EV access laws for renters are slowly gaining traction.
- EV batteries are getting large enough that you can get by with fast charging once or so a week off-property. I know tesla drivers that do not charge at home.
- craigslist has a checkbox for "EV charging" when searching for apartments.
What are some of these laws? Does that mean I get to charge at more private chargers?
One of the big obstacles to going EV (besides the lack of cost-effective EV rental) is that all the chargers around me are private chargers whereas the gas stations are public.
One thing to note is that for many people, a standard 120 volt 15 amp outlet will be enough for day-to-day usage. In a Tesla, that gets you ~5 miles/hour of charging speed, so if you leave it alone for ~14 hours, there's 70 miles of range added.
So maybe an extension cord and a normal outlet gets you what you want.
The mph number when charging is a made-up number. I think it is a fixed number for the type of vehicle, and will not reflect anything variable like temperature or driving style/history.
The fixed number seems to depend on the car. It would be higher for a model 3 and lower for a model X.
And I'd guess that a large performance model X on wide tires in a cold climate might not get the same miles from a kilowatt as a standard model 3 with aero rims in a temperate climate.
I’d say this is too strong a take. The mph number is certainly not completely accurate, but it’s also not made up out of whole cloth. The number I was quoting was for a Model Y, a Model 3 will have better, X will have worse. Given that 3’s and Y’s massively outsell S and X, it’s a reasonably conservative choice.
The mph number is overstated if you use AC/heat, and/or travel >75 mph. But it’s not more than 30% off in my experience. It should do pretty well in the Bay Area where the weather tends to be mild.
I imagine if their engineers were any good the mph number would collect data on the user's past trips and make increasingly better estimates in the future about the translation between kWh and miles for the specific user.
Obviously a user in Kansas would get more miles per kWh than a user in the Swiss Alps but the vehicle has data on where all the user has driven and how many kWh were used at every instant since it was purchased.
I think that value for the charging speed is really important enough scale.
Meanwhile, there are a few ways to view battery charge:
- miles of range remaining (the default)
- ideal miles of range remaining
- percentage.
Turns out, percentage is a much more rational way to view battery charge. Charge to 70% or 80% is absolute and graspable.
Charging to range is variable and not really that helpful. Maybe if you are a really consistent and conservative driver it would work for you, but I've found it to be unpredictably inaccurate and leads to confusion.
5 mph is what I’ve seen in practice on a Model Y. That figure is generally an overstatement of real range, but not by too much. Definitely depends on the commute length.
Unless you count the cost of the fossil fuel infrastructure that you still require for the hours and days when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow. Then renewables are extremely expensive.
In a big fan of solar energy, the idea that I can power my whole life with sunlight is great.
But I do wonder, is anyone championing solar as a solution to environmental damage actually taking stock of the impact? With oil and gas, you drill a little hole in the ground. Once it is burned, it is in the air, mostly short lived pollutants, besides carbon dioxide, which can be sequestered and even turned into food by plants. With solar (and the batteries needed to store energy), you've got pit mines, heavy metals in local water, all sorts of toxic byproducts of production, and then the production is dependent on surface area. I do think climate change has sucked all the air out of the room with regard to the environmental movement and not enough is being done to fight all these other negative impacting behaviors, and I wonder if we aren't in at least as bad a boat with solar and batteries.
Oil would run out within decades. We can safely assume the presence of solar energy for the next million years.
Solar panels take land. But there is a lot of desert and semi-desert land which has perfect insolation, like 350 days of unrestricted sunshine per year. The energy produced there could be used to produce freshwater from nearby seas. The shadow afforded by the panels could help host some sustainable vegetation.
The dangerous chemicals can be, with the help of plentiful energy, transformed to more benign chemicals, or recycled.
As long as solar panels and wind turbines produce significantly more energy in their lifetime than it takes to construct them, they can pay off their own externalities.
You can’t just burn the oil. You have to build the engines, turbines, exhaust. It’s not clear cursorily that mining for making panels and batteries is worse than fossil power.
With oil you have the occasional catastrophe where you poison a whole gulf, and leaky pipelines. Not to mention the massive damage caused by the extraction from tar sands.
With coal you have open pit mining for lignite like here in Germany, with runoff poisoning rivers, Mercury pollution from burning it, and for bituminous coal which is mined underground you have to keep the mines clear of the groundwater literally forever or risk poisoning the local water supply.
Unless you cut those plants that sequestered CO2 and bury them very deep, the CO2 will eventually be released again. We introduced a ton of extra carbon to the cycle, and taking it out isn’t easy.
Well, it gets sequestered into the process and spends most of it's time as biomass. Keep in mind, every ounce of that carbon was once part of the carbon cycle on earth that was sequestered due to tectonic forces.
