[deleted]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQzH_j1-FjE

None of that is going to happen. Renewables will take over because the profit motive is the most powerful force in our modern world.

And you are wrong about battery plants. Look up the Moss Landing plant in California. They replaced 5 of 7 natural gas units with two battery farms (one in the turbine hall, and the other in what was the parking lot). The two most efficient NG units were kept as backup/peaker units.

[deleted]

Well that’s for sure. The over head for building a plant isn’t just money expensive, it’s a massive time investment too because of inspection regulations prior to activation. But in terms of power out compared to impact to environment seems to be the current best option (damaged solar components cannot in most cases be recycled or repaired, at least based on what they told us in school and the fins on a wind turbine are very similar causing them to be a potentially big garbage issue) so I wish we could look past that investment overhead and focus on the output :( I know very idealistic and naive I just wish

> Which would've worked had this happened a decade or two ago.

Imagining an alternate past is a waste of time, unless you have a time machine. The future is all we can affect.

The Vogtle plant expansion in Georgia (from 2 to 4 reactors), is costing three times as much per delivered kWh as solar. That's why there's no new nuclear planned in the US.

New nuclear, like small modular reactors, will have to prove they are cheaper, not promise it, because nuclear promises have all failed to come in at budget.

> Last I checked, and it wasn't that long ago, we were still adding fossil fuel burning over and above what we were burning before.

Coal, oil, and natural gas were about level between 2018 and 2021. Solar and wind increased about 50% in those years, but they are still relatively small (4.3% of global energy in '21)

Yeah Germany is the last place on earth you should try any of that. They will drop kick you.

Tesla tried in their German plant. The union and courts were not impressed at all.

Yeah, there no getting around the fact apple are a very ugly company internally. The built in company culture of bullying and harassment seems to be across all divisions. Feels like a nasty, nasty shop with a country club veneer from the outside.

That's funny because any time I've reported a nonconsensual intimate image being shared, they tell me I'm wrong.

> The silicon is downcycled to steel alloying or similar industrial use.

There is no need to do that. Used solar cells are purer silicon than what comes out of carbothermal reduction of quartz sand to 98.5% pure silicon metal. So you can throw them into the process at that point. The reduction to metal is very energy intensive, so recycling will reduce the energy to make new panels.

They probably are not doing it yet because the volume is so low. Silicon steel is used in transformers and motors, and is even less picky about impurities. So they would just throw the old cells in.

If you ever need proof unions are good for workers and not the companies bottom-line, look at what’s going on with Starbucks, Chipotle, Apple etc right now.

[removed]

My condolences to anyone that has to suffer using Teams on a daily basis.

Corporations in America. If apple tried any of that crap in the EU they’d get nuked from orbit.

Nearly all of silicon solar panels can be recycled. The main materials are aluminum, glass, sometimes plastic, silicon metal, and copper. The effective life of a panel is 100 years, but none of them are that old yet. 99.9% are less than 22 years old, and 50% are less than 3 years old. So few are being recycled because they aren't old enough yet.

[removed]

I've been on Reddit for a while and I'm glad to see these changes. There used to be some really questionable communities and concepts that appeared to be endorsed via the lack of action.

Because these things take time. For example, over the last 12 years, solar and wind have been squeezing out coal and gas as far as new power plants. But there were already a lot of old power plants, and not all of them have been shut down yet.

Except it won't being a complete vaporware.

That would've been good 2 decades ago. We can't wait for that now.

Realistically we should be nationalizing most industries, completely shutting down useless ones, removing all non essential travel, ripping up roads and putting in massive rail networks in place with massive increases in nuclear plant construction.

Moving people from suburbs into either high density cities or rural areas used to support said cities, like we had before cheap oil.

And also providing people with the essentials to prevent mass civil unrest.

This is similar levels of effort that WW2 required.

Anything less at this point is just inviting disasters on a scale our species has never seen.

Edit: having renewables are great but they have a limit. They are good auxiliary power but cost compared to battery plants vs nulcear power favors nuclear fission. We can even add in further breeder reactors to get more energy out of previously spent fuel.

> Not this slow plodding shit.

You are not describing reality. Solar energy doubled from 2016 to 2019, and doubled again by 2022. That's not plodding, it is exponential growth.

Since 1992 solar increased by a factor of 10,000. It just took time to get the prices down and production up. Right now, solar manufacturers are building up their supply chain for another doubling of production rate.

Always tripped me out that sociopathy and economic success seem to be so correlated in our society, EG there was that research that suggested that CEOs are among the professions with the most sociopaths/psychpaths. I don't know if "sociopathy should not be rewarded but punished" is a hot take.

They did and that's why they were heavily involved with the mob. Which made unions easy targets for law enforcement during the Regan years. It fit their narrative perfectly that unions were just robbing the working man.