There is nothing inherently preventing these things to be done with electricity from renewable sources (and the carbon for the chemical processes only acts as a cheap oxygen acceptor). It is just that burning coal is still cheaper and has existing infrastructure.
There are many economic areas where replacing fossile fuels is indeed very difficult, and only mining somewhat falls into those. The material processing necessary for solar panel production would be actually more simple and energy efficient with electricity. For example a lot of aluminium ore is already processed with electricity produced from geothermal sources in Europe.
This article ignores a lot of reality when it comes to firming renewables, and my paranoia was triggered when they wrote mainstream media.
Shilling out for the fossil fuel lobby.
Sure, it is not going to be easy, or quick (enough), but cost is going to drive out the more expensive forms of generation, which will be coal and gas.
What I find particularly suspicious about the article is that there’s no mention about battery technology. We have batteries that can store energy for four to eight hours efficiently right now.
I believe that there was some interesting points made, but ultimately, it is a narrow and disingenuous take on things.
Do you know of a way to efficiently produce the infrastructure needed for solar, wind, etc using energy from solar, wind, etc such that the energy return on energy (ERoE) is high enough? That seemed like the crux of the argument made in the article, and I’d be interested to read a rebuttal.
https://futurism.com/electricity-generated-solar-power
Here’s an article that addresses some of the concerns that were raised by the author of your article, at least in terms of the materials usage. I’ve not found anything about the thermal requirements for some manufacturing processes, but couldn’t we use CSP or green hydrogen for the necessary processes?
Our biggest problem in my opinion, is efficiency and hitting our growth ceiling. But we don’t have to have a bleak future as outlined by the author of your article.
The Honest Sorcerer blog writes in the style of doom porn, and gives off the same kind of writing energy as Ayn Rand, in terms of absolutism.
Thats from 2010 btw. Oil got even worse with fracking and solar and wind way better. Wikipedia has a bunch of examples.
I don’t doubt that the return on investment for solar and wind will continue to improve relative to fossil fuels when used for electricity generation, but the problem seems to be, again, the manufacture of infrastructure such as wind turbines, photovoltaic panels, and so on, which require energy-intensive mining and refining of minerals. Unless every stage of the manufacturing process can be electrified, the efficiency of generating electricity using wind and solar won’t matter in the slightest, as there will be no way to use that electricity to eventually recycle/replace the existing wind/solar infrastructure, let alone to deploy more of it or to do either of these while maintaining the high energy return on energy invested.
To be clear, I don’t want solar/wind/etc to be dependent on fossil fuels at all, and so I would be interested to read an explanation of how these (or other) clean energy technologies can be deployed without using fossil fuels at any stage of the process. The problem presented in the article seems to be that such technologies currently do depend upon the use of coal, and I posted the article here with the idea that it might get people to start thinking about potential solutions to this problem, not to suggest that the deployment of clean energy technologies is not worthwhile.
Realistically, even if photovoltaic panels and wind turbines can be recycled 100% efficiently, the supply of energy from these sources at any given time will still have an upper limit based on the finite supply of the minerals required for these technologies, so people cannot continue to increase their energy consumption indefinitely even from “renewable” sources. But that’s a separate problem.
I feel like an ethics-optional group that wants to really end the use of coal could run a campaign of breaking into or drilling down to the most profitable commercial coal seams and lighting them on fire. More Centralia, Pennsylvanias, especially in populated areas, would probably permanently dampen the domestic industry and drive prices far upwards leading to the faster growth of alternatives. The obvious tradeoff is, those seams your group lit are going to burn for a very very long time, so you’re causing some emissions in exchange for a global reduction.
It would seem that scaling back the use of many modern technologies is both necessary and inevitable. When hydrocarbon-based energy sources run out, it’s back to old-fashioned carbohydrates…
Earth system scientists put the kind of society complex enough for hospitals and higher education require an energy returned on energy invested in the teens. ‘Renewables’ (let’s call them low carbon, there isn’t anything very renewable about the blade of a wind turbine) barely touch that and often don’t get near.
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The picture is so varied that one can find statistics to counter this ‘barely touches the teens’ claim. Look at the totality of the picture and draw your own conclusions. I am just presenting some reasoning to justify a claim that we are heading towards a much lower energy future, maybe next century or something (which doesn’t have to be bad, provided everybody isn’t slaving for a class of energy-obese billionaires protected by a fascist police state).
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I looked into this a lot about 15 years ago, when it seemed that we were still in the last chance saloon on avoiding catastrophic climate change. The science might have moved on. I don’t have current sources anybody interested in the concept of eroei and the complexity it creates will have to look themselves.
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