this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
49 points (82.7% liked)

Technology

59287 readers
3773 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] abhibeckert@lemmy.world 1 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Solar, wind, hydro can do it, but the amount of CO2 produced by manufacturing the generators is still massive

That's FUD.

Sure - the concrete in a large hydro dam requires a staggering amount of electricity to produce (because the chemical reaction to produce cement needs insane amounts of heat), but there's no reason any CO2 needs to be emitted. You can absolutely use zero emission power to high temperatures needed to produce cement.

And not all hydro needs a massive concrete wall. There's a hydro station near my city that doesn't have a dam at all - it's just a series of pipes that run from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a mountain. There's a permanent medium sized river that never stops flowing that comes down off the mountain - with an elevation change of several hundred metres. It provides more power than the entire city's consumption and does so while only diverting a tiny percentage of the river's water. As the city grows, the power plant can easily be upgraded to divert more of the water though pipes instead of flowing uselessly down towards the sea.

Covid and Russia's war created massive fluctuations recently but if you look through that noise global CO2 emissions are pretty much flat and have been for a few years now. They are almost certainly going to trend downwards going forward (a lot of countries already are seeing downward movement).

The simple reality is fossil fuels are now too expensive to be competitive. Why would anyone power an AI (or mine crypto) with coal power that costs $4,074/kW when you could use Solar at $1,300/kW (during the day. At night it's more like $1,700 to $2,000 with the best storage options, such as batteries or pumped storage). Or wind at around $1,700.

Nuclear is $8,000/kW unless you live in Russia, where safety is largely ignored.

Hydro can be cheap if you happen to be near an ideal river - but for most locations it's not competitive with Solar/Wind. So hydro is safe as a long term power generation method into the future, but it's never going to be the dominant form of power unless (like my city) you happen to have ideal geology.

[โ€“] Melkath@kbin.social 1 points 6 months ago

Where do you think rebar comes from?