• Linechecker@monero.town
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    It’s not that simple to electrify with renewable. We’d need to mine wayyyy more copper for wiring. We’d need to produce wayyy more rubber for insulated coatings of all those wires. We’d need wayyy more transformers. And if every garage in America has a car charging in it, then we’ll need wayyy more batteries and We’d have a lot more load on our electric infrastructure. In the end, we’d still need fossil fuel infrastructure to account for when the sun’s not shining and wind isn’t blowing.

    • naturalgasbad
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      And yet, China this year deployed more solar panels than the US in it’s entire history.

      • Linechecker@monero.town
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        That’s great for them, I hope it was worth it in the end. And that would work great in a desert and southern California, but it won’t work to well in most of the USA due to weather.

        • naturalgasbad
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          1 year ago

          Solar panels are so obscenely cheap that their profitability curve works in a ton of weather conditions you wouldn’t expect.

          The fact that it’s so expensive in the US is entirely decoupled from their manufacturing cost.

          • Linechecker@monero.town
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            Then why is it over $35k to get them installed on a house’s roof? And still I’d need to be plugged into the grid.

            • naturalgasbad
              link
              fedilink
              English
              arrow-up
              1
              arrow-down
              1
              ·
              1 year ago

              The costs in the US are completely fucked. Partially because of tariffs on imports, partially because of bullshit regulations that protect the large existing players, and partially because American workers are just, frankly, less efficient.

              • Linechecker@monero.town
                link
                fedilink
                English
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 year ago

                Speaking from experience since I looked into it, there’s scammers peddling solar panels and overall, from a financial point of view, they are just a bad deal - Too much cost, with little upside with extra risk. In addition it certainly does not increase home values at all.

                However, in southern California and deserts, it would make sense to get solar since the sun shines more.

                Also wind turbine industry needs to start making recyclable blades cuz used blades take up a lot of space in landfills.