brewster wrote: ↑Tue Aug 20, 2019 11:58 am
Pollution is a function of GDP. More economic activity pollutes more. The US is the largest economy in the world. We pollute the most. The discussion of trash is beside the point, even though we create more of it by far than anyone else, industrial pollution is where the real numbers are.
As for renewables, here's yet another article about wind becoming cheaper than gas. In this case, the study say building turbines is cheaper than even burning gas in already existing plants. Yes turbines take up room, but we're the fucking Saudi Arabia of wind! Every cornfield in Iowa should have turbines too, and stop with the ethanol from grain nonsense.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/08 ... tural-gas/
This week, the US Department of Energy released a report that looks back on the state of wind power in the US by running the numbers on 2018. The analysis shows that wind hardware prices are dropping, even as new turbine designs are increasing the typical power generated by each turbine. As a result, recent wind farms have gotten so cheap that you can build and operate them for less than the expected cost of buying fuel for an equivalent natural gas plant.
Thanks for bringing it back on topic. And yes, pollution is a function of economic activity.
The problem with wind power is energy storage. No doubt wind power will be more common in the future, but it really can't replace natural gas or coal. We need power plants who can generate power according to the demand, and this is impossible with wind and solar power. They're a great addition to other systems, but we need to base energy production on methods where it's possible to store the energy.
Gas, coal and hydropower are great at this. Hydropower is probably the most valuable method there is, since it can store vast amounts of energy, generate power as it's needed, and even pump water back in the dams whenever energy is dirt cheap, for example together with wind.
But most countries really don't have the geography for hydropower. Norway, Greenland, Venezuela Canada and Brazil have enough waterfalls and rivers to exploit this to the fullest, but it's simply not enough of it to supply the world's energy demand this way.
Also, keeping in mind how valuable fresh water will be, a lot of the countries with large hydropowerplants have to choose between electricity and irrigation. China and India really can't waste any more water now, and there will be conflicts between the interests of the agricultural sector and the industrial sector.