...sustainable.
Regrettably, there remains a large subset of people who believe that batteries are the "cure" for the inherent unreliability of so called "renewable energy." Huge industrial scale battery farms are being built around the world, including but hardly limited to California.
In response to a "renewable energy will save us" person writing here about how beautiful Tesla Powerwalls would make the solar and wind scam "green," I wrote this post, which refers to how much cobalt would be required to cover a (then) recent "Dunkelflaute" event in Germany:
The Number of Tesla Powerwalls Required That Would Address the Current German Dunkleflaute Event.
An excerpt from that post::
Here are the specifications of Tesla Powerwalls®:
Specifications of Powerwalls®.
It is claimed they have a useable capacity of 13.5 kWh after being charged with 14 kWh of electricity, presumably at 25°C, with a putative thermodynamic efficiency - should you choose to believe it - of 96%. The maximum continuous power output is said to be 5 kW. The power requirements to match the combined coal and gas average continuous power of combined German coal and gas over the last 30 days, 44.4 GW would require 8,880,000 million Powerwalls®, to cover each day of Dunkelflaute; for 30 days, given that the wind wasn't blowing that much over that period, 266,400,000 Powerwalls®.
The specifications say that each Powerwall® weighs 114 kg, meaning that 30,369,600,000 kg of Powerwalls® would be required just for Germany.
According to Forbes,
15% of the weight of a Tesla Powerwall is cobalt, mined by Elon's happy Congolese slaves, meaning that the happy Congolese cobalt slaves would be required to mine and isolate 4,555,400 metric tons of cobalt to make Powerwalls® to cover this instance of Dunkleflaute with batteries.
This is 31.63 times as large as the world production of cobalt in 2021 according to the
US Geological Survey
I'm sorry!!! I forgot to use "percent talk!" The demand for cobalt to cover month long Dunkleflaute in Germany observed in Nov-Dec 2022 would be 3163% the demand for all the world cobalt supply in 2021.
The calculations are strictly "back of the envelope" but doing calculations of this type can, in my opinion, eliminate the risk of mouthing insane wishful thinking rhetoric.
The belief that storing energy, which always involves a thermodynamic loss, is the same as having clean
primary energy is a very toxic urban myth. It's killing us.
As for data centers, here's what I had to say in
a recent post in another thread:
Like anything, data science can be used or abused. As a person working in the sciences, I am mostly involved with...
...the good, not the bad.
In particular, the understanding of the ongoing disaster of extreme global heating, which is clearly to my mind an outgrowth of the coddling of fossil fuels with so called "renewable energy" lipstick on the pig, is very much involved in data processing.
To the extent power is used to power porn sites for the "family values" Republican candidate for Governor of North Carolina; I regard this simply as a part of the price we pay for the abuse of otherwise good technology. Crypto may be another case; I don't follow it.
In the field of molecular biology, in which much of my professional work is involved, a key to understanding human disease, data processing is very important; a mass spectrometer generates huge amounts of data which would be impossible to analyze with a pencil and paper. A computer can now do in five minutes what would have taken graduate students years of work, and a full thesis, to do less than 30 years ago.
This website requires energy. It doesn't run only when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. I regard DU as a positive resource.
I am hoping that this trend, refurbishing and restarting nuclear reactors will come closer to my home, refurbishing and restarting Oyster Creek. That reactor, a gift from my father's generation to mine, might prove to be a gift from my generation to that of my children if we restore it and bring it back.
If we are save what is left to save, and to restore what can be restored it should be unambiguously clear that we need reliable and clean energy, which nuclear, and only nuclear, can provide.
Thanks for your reference. I may not find the time to access it, but from what I can see, there would be much with which I am likely to agree.
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