Is Renewable Energy a Boondoggle?

Tell that to the prospective plant's neighbors, Exelon wants Pennsylvania to subsidize the remaining Three Mile Island plant or it will close it in September. The problem is cheap natural gas. Well, I guess it's only a problem for Exelon.

I would have thought that the idea of PV plant waste poisoning children in some awful place like Pakistan or China would be right in line with most people’s concepts of utopia here.

But I think you’re talking about cadmium and tellurium and stuff like that. The quantity of waste produced may be poorly understood. Manufacturing plants don’t have to dump their waste into the ground. Properly maintained PV panels don’t generate any waste at all. It’s only when they’re vandalized or destroyed by natural disasters that they become sources of heavy metal pollution.

That a solar farm owner might choose to leave a bunch of shattered panels lying around after a tornado shouldn’t be an indictment against the technology itself. We eliminated lead and cadmium from cell phones and laptops, and we can eliminate hazardous waste from PV panels too. We can also educate and regulate the users so they don’t do shitty things like leave broken panels where they’ll get rained on and poison the groundwater.

We could do it. We could do anything. The problem is Solar only works in the day time. Windmills only work when the Wind is blowing and they kill a shit ton of birds. Hydroelectric requires big rivers and kills fish.

Geothermal has very little drawbacks other only being available in some areas.

Honestly I think thorium reactors are a way forward.

Hydrogen is a renewable fuel. Requires some titanium engine parts. Germans are working more cost effect titanium extraction and smelting techniques. Even with titanium's current prices HIC is affordable because all you need to do to get hydrogen is run electricity through water.

Diesel engines immune to EMP and would work after a nuclear strike. All of the renewable shit not so much. So strategically we need all of the technologies renewable or not.

The Green New Deal is complete fuckery.

No recently manufactured diesels exist that aren’t computer controlled. They’re identical to gasoline engines in that respect.

But.. it really isn’t that difficult to EMP-harden electronics. You put it in a metal box. Modern Warfare 2 is not the best scientific reference on the effects of a local nuclear strike on machinery.

Dont forget energy storage mediums like lithium batteries are absolutely devestating to the environment compared to previous technologies.

Older ICE vehicles are fine though as they have no sensitive electronics. Less maybe the radio. If you have a spare engine management system you kept wrapped in Lead you can swap that out and get a more modern vehicle up and running again. An EMP will pretty much wreck any sensitive electronics not shielded in an inch of steel.

The older computers with something like a MOS 6502 processor might still run after a strike. You can get printed circuit boards for home brew systems based on older micropocessors. Having an EMP for things like laptops, CB radios, and other communications equipment is important.

Graphene supercapacitors will be commercially available within the next few years.

Your mum will be commercially available within the next few years.

Accept that you have to store that energy. Do you understand how many batteries that would take?

Especially for the U.S?
Power in China is regulated and doled out, it doesn't matter to them if they don't have power all the time.

That's not true, the sun works all the time. We just need to put solar farms on satellites high enough that nights only last a few minutes, and at that altitude multiple satellites will have line of sight to any given power collector on the ground. Using solar power from orbit is definitely possible with currently available technology, it's just a huge initial investment.

Wew lad.