The environmental impacts of wind, solar, batteries, and other technologies are important and not getting the attention they deserve. Both the full life cycle of manufacturing and also the land use impacts need to be properly accounted for. The productivity of wind and solar tend to be wildly exaggerated while their impacts on the landscape minimized. There is growing resistance in rural areas to industrial renewable energy, and for good reason. I would not want to live less than a mile from a large wind turbine, they have a dramatic impact on people's quality of life, especially if you are directly in its wake or shadows, it will make your home unlivable. And while rooftop solar is great, productivity is relatively trivial. Cutting down forests and razing 1 sq km of intact ecosystems to build 100MW of solar is going in the wrong direction environmentally if you ask me. We need ecosystems intact so they can pull down carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into soil and life, more than we need new sources of electronics waste.
I wonder how the implementation of solar may affect these kinds of questions. Places that have a lot of wasted developed surface area, like roofs, are also places with high energy use. Maybe we'll find that solar's place in the world isn't in greenfield but in already developed areas
I do solar development for a living. On any given rooftop solar will not generally provide all the energy that is used in the building, obviously, this varies from building to building. At a certain point though, all the good locations get built out, and then you are maxed. We don't build new hydropower these days because there are no more sites in North America, we built them all out decades ago.
What's more important is that solar does not provide the kind of foundational energy that is used for industry. You can't operate a solar panel factory using only solar panels, it takes high-temperature manufacturing that operates 24/7 to turn sand into silicon wafers. Solar has very low capacity factor, sub 20% generally. Likewise, for wind turbines, you need hydrocarbons to make the steel, plastics, concrete, chemicals, refined metals, heavy equipment, etc, that go into a wind turbine. Wind and solar are useful tools in the toolkit, and they help us to be efficient in our use of hydrocarbons, but they don't replace them on the foundational level.
My view is that we need clean fuels, used efficiently, and we should soak up the carbon emissions in our ecosystems through regenerative agriculture and reforestation, and generally reestablishing nature as much as possible.
The environmental impacts of wind, solar, batteries, and other technologies are important and not getting the attention they deserve. Both the full life cycle of manufacturing and also the land use impacts need to be properly accounted for. The productivity of wind and solar tend to be wildly exaggerated while their impacts on the landscape minimized. There is growing resistance in rural areas to industrial renewable energy, and for good reason. I would not want to live less than a mile from a large wind turbine, they have a dramatic impact on people's quality of life, especially if you are directly in its wake or shadows, it will make your home unlivable. And while rooftop solar is great, productivity is relatively trivial. Cutting down forests and razing 1 sq km of intact ecosystems to build 100MW of solar is going in the wrong direction environmentally if you ask me. We need ecosystems intact so they can pull down carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into soil and life, more than we need new sources of electronics waste.
I wonder how the implementation of solar may affect these kinds of questions. Places that have a lot of wasted developed surface area, like roofs, are also places with high energy use. Maybe we'll find that solar's place in the world isn't in greenfield but in already developed areas
I do solar development for a living. On any given rooftop solar will not generally provide all the energy that is used in the building, obviously, this varies from building to building. At a certain point though, all the good locations get built out, and then you are maxed. We don't build new hydropower these days because there are no more sites in North America, we built them all out decades ago.
What's more important is that solar does not provide the kind of foundational energy that is used for industry. You can't operate a solar panel factory using only solar panels, it takes high-temperature manufacturing that operates 24/7 to turn sand into silicon wafers. Solar has very low capacity factor, sub 20% generally. Likewise, for wind turbines, you need hydrocarbons to make the steel, plastics, concrete, chemicals, refined metals, heavy equipment, etc, that go into a wind turbine. Wind and solar are useful tools in the toolkit, and they help us to be efficient in our use of hydrocarbons, but they don't replace them on the foundational level.
My view is that we need clean fuels, used efficiently, and we should soak up the carbon emissions in our ecosystems through regenerative agriculture and reforestation, and generally reestablishing nature as much as possible.