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Pros & Cons of Renewable Energy

Woody

Solar Enthusiast
Joined
Dec 13, 2020
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Location
High Plains Northern Nevada
I found this article discussing the pros and cons of renewable energy that I thought would be worth sharing.


This article doesn’t go into a lot of details but a general overview. I haven’t seen other articles listing the various energy sources let alone comparing them in a simple pros and cons approach. Most articles rave about renewables and protest the horrors of all other energy sources or vise versa. Clearly there is a place for all of these energy sources and we need a well rounded basket of energy approach.

So I’d love to hear others on their pros and cons on their experiences with renewable energy systems that they have implemented and used. What worked well and what failed. Plus got any good articles worth sharing on renewable systems. For example, Home Power magazine was a good source for these systems (usually more positive than negative reporting) but they have moved on. I subscribed to them shortly after they first went into print for years. Their archives are still out there. Anyone know of good print sources for renewable energy. Yes that’s old school but printed material has its advantages over electrical gadgets.
 
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interesting article but a bit naive about the reality of renewable...kind of...
1)In every case from solar to wind to hydro government regulations and "licensing" are a huge factor in time and cost. They just mention in the cons "illegal in some areas"...thats actually a rather big "con" hehe
2)They failed to start the article clearly (and granted I am an old retired engineer with a few degrees); they completly missed the point where you START with the math... Really, this is how you need to always start the analysis. Even if you assume a lot of things would be "perfect". I see in the article that at least they recommend a book or two that do try and make people realize energy is not "magic". But it does not take very long at all to show that, in reality, the dream of all renewable is just that, its a dream until you completely change the worlds consumption rate (which will mean the politicians and oligarchs get the nice life and the rest of us, well, sleep cold and sweat during the day).
3) global economies and where the good stuff is... yea, china and north korea have the most rare earth deposits; and china has wisely been importing them while saving their own, its a smart plan. The materials and factories to "make" renewable energy products have to come from somewhere.

bottom line.. we need to use everything we have and funnel money into fusion research. Stop dead language and gender studies doctorate programs and get some scientists and engineers working on things that will really help.
Germany is working on the Wendelstein reactor (stellarator variant)which is moving along, but so slowwwwww.
other are working on tokamak variants...
Rumor has it they are 5-10yrs from something viable; given societies current walk of into the deep end of stupidity, this is the only solution to a lot of problems, and so it will probably fail to get support (it involves "real" math and science which people just do not understand anymore).
(what happened to colleges requiring macro-economics, statistics, critical reasoning???)

so, watch for articles on fusion research, take a peak at sciencedaily.com in the energy section now and then. The fusion sites ocasionally have updates but they move at a glacial pace (limited funding makes things slow and coupled with a really really hard problem, well, to be expected)

Renewable energy for homes is, well... we are here for fun I thought hehe
It is fun to have lots of battery backup power for when the grid goes poof. The off grid folks like to get by with less because, well, they want to.
I think we should all enjoy what energy can provide, try and burn at least 500kwatts a month!!!
Regarding cost savings, the payback period always seems long so I think its more about convenience.
 
I think the article above softballs the real reality of "Renewable Energy". Among many things, the location of most of the world's Cobalt and The Democratic Republic of the Congo reportedly exploits child labor to mine it, something that for any other cause would be unacceptable, but because it "powers" our thirst for green energy, no one talks about it.

But this article from Aug 2019 in the Wall Street Journal takes a different look at the subject:

 
The article in the OP was bit depressing, but it's true there is no panacea... every form of energy production has some issues.

I thought she missed the point on EVs though. The notion that EVs just move the dirty fuel consumption from point A to B and so are "just as bad" is wrong. EV's aren't necessarily 100% clean (unless like some folks on the forum it's charged from PV), but it's overall less dirty on average (30% cleaner in this study) as the other forms of energy are generally more efficient and there is a mix of renewables. So, every ~3.3 EVs on the road is like taking one more gas car off the road today, and more tomorrow as more renewables come online.

This part was probably all to true:
Most of the methylmercury from coal combustion falls within a 5 miles radius of the coal-fired power plant....My research got stopped. My faculty mentor made excuses. I think she got a call telling me to knock it off. Who wants some college kid pointing out that the kids ... might be in a pollution hot zone?
To me the real "con" to some renewables (e.g., solar, wind) is that they're not steady. That's not even a con, we just need to realize that energy storage and a reliable transmission system to ship power from it's stored to where it's needed is a mandatory part of the solution - matching the capacity to demand and predictable overall conditions. You just can't throw PV and wind at the problems.

Many of our nuclear plants were only designed to operate for 30-50 years before being replaced or upgraded.
I'm in that boat. A nuclear power plant up the road is 50 years old. It was designed to last 40 years. They just got permission to operate for another 30 years. If it goes, Miami will have to be evacuated. Also fun factoid, the emergency generators to keep the water circulating to prevent a meltdown...same as Fukushima, barely above sea level in this hurricane prone region.

... the location of most of the world's Cobalt...
That form of exploitation should put anyone off cobalt based products.
Fortunately, cobalt isn't a requirement. In fact, it's old tech. https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/22/21451670/tesla-cobalt-free-cathodes-mining-battery-nickel-ev-cost.

Energy storage isn't necessarily batteries either. In fact, in the 1,698 entries in the DoE Energy Storage project database, only about one-third were some form of Lithium based electro-chemical solution.

... this article from Aug 2019 in the Wall Street Journal...
I wish they'd stop with this idiotic argument:
“Renewable energy” is a misnomer. Wind and solar machines and batteries are built from nonrenewable materials. And they wear out.
It's true that they wear out and break. But, it's also true that coal fired plants wear out, and they probably wear out faster. The advantage to renewable energy is what happens in-between commissioning and decommissioning. It also false that materials aren't recyclable at decommissioning. Solar panels can be (ref), concrete can be (ref), even lithium batteries can be (ref).
 
But the bottom line is still true. For the planet to go very renewable by 2050,if we went as far as the Paris climate accord mandates, there are not enough raw elements on the planet to produce the infrastructure with our current forms of renewable tech.
 
Whoa is this what large scale solar green energy is going to look like? This picture is tagged as being in China. Not sure covering up every square foot is a good practice. I thought the objective was to decrease humans impact on the environment.
 

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The U.S. consumed 3.8 trillion kilowatthours in 2020 [ref], so that's about 10,410,958,904 kWh/d, at insolation of 4 that's an array of 2,602,739,726 kW. Solar tech currently is around .177 kW/m², so that's an area of 14,704,744,000 m².

The average house is about 240 m², so let's say a usable roof area of 200 m². There are 139 million homes in the U.S., so 27,800,000,000 m² available.

So, to power the U.S., about 14,704,744,000 m² needed / 27,800,000,000 m² available = ~53%. So, if about 53% of the homes had solar there would be no need for land taken up with solar farms and the power would already be where the people live. Naturally, it's me, so don't trust the math. That doesn't include barns or commercial rooftops, so a lot more is available.

Beyond that, the U.S. has 4.18 million miles of road [ref]. Let's say the average road is 3.7 m wide. That's 24,889,900,000 m², or 60% coverage would provide the total U.S. needs.

Just between those two already consumed land areas there's about 4x what we need (less as in winter an insolation of 4 is fairly generous). So, I don't see a need to start covering up mount Rushmore or even keep building solar farms. Just outlaw any non-solar roofing material. In 15 years we'd have no need for wind, coal or oil. Yeah, that's incredibly naive and simplistic, ;-) It might happen someday, but we need mature affordable battery tech first.
 
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