Whoops - i misread it as 120 GW of solar. Sorry, John!

More and more people are saying it:
bsky.app/profile/volt...

More and more people are saying it:
bsky.app/profile/volt...

Wait til these people hear about the technology called (checks notes) horses

Yeah, that is a great term. People would show up saying "I need to glue this thing to that thing" and I'd do a bit of thinking and pick out an adhesive

New red flag just dropped

It has become my go-to choice for most jobs, replacing most epoxy- and urethane-based alternatives.

I say this as a person with a polymer engineering degree, who used to hand out adhesives (from a fridge with 50+ options) as a major part of my job:

Gorilla Glue is an excellent and versatile product.

I'm not here to do homework problems for you - it is not that hard to calculate yourself and I have work to do. I've been through all this, in detail, multiple times on energy twitter 10 yrs ago, so I'm not interested in rehashing. But good luck investigating these well-studied questions!

RE land use is higher than the legacy system but small compared to available space or several existing industries (such as corn or soybeans). And much of that land use is still available for other uses, like the farmland under and around wind farms.

These are pretty old anti-renewables talking points and were thoroughly refuted 10+ yrs ago. High-RE systems are feasible, but become much cheaper with firm clean generation like nuclear or NG with CCS.

If you are so focused on the effects of mining and refining, what is your perspective on the billions of tons of mining that we already do for the legacy energy system? That is pretty dirty at every step of the process and large in scale. Is it not better to do less of the bad thing?

Is this in Belgium? Looks like it meets Belgian building code.

Energy transition will require substantially less mining than the current fossil system There are legitimate concerns about the mining required for clean energy technologies, feeding arguments why rapid scaling of renewables and electric vehicles (EVs) is undesirable. Yet, a clean-energy...

Well, if you don't like that source, here is a nice article from Joule (a high-quality energy journal). Note that your "AI summary" doesn't contradict an overall decrease in mining - it only says that certain types of mining will need to increase significantly (true!).
www.cell.com/joule/fullte...

Actually, this chart is probably the simplest way to make the point.

Source: ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-t...

Actually, this chart is probably the simplest way to make the point.

Source: ourworldindata.org/low-carbon-t...

I don't know that I believe the specific numbers, but generally a clean energy transition pretty clearly results in less mining and processing of materials. So if your focus is on reducing those industrial processes, clean energy is better - but not zero, or even close!

Mining quantities for low-carbon energy is hundreds to thousands of times lower than mining for fossil fuels We will need to mine millions of tonnes of minerals to transition to low-carbon energy. But we're currently mining billions of tonnes of fossil fuels every year.

Here is an analysis showing that energy-related mining under a clean energy transition is estimated to be 100-1000X lower than current mining. What is your source?

hannahritchie.substack.com/p/mining-low...

Bluesky made me look at this. And instead of having a stroke thinking about it, I'm making you look at it. (sorry, not sorry)

As far as I know, my ancestors from 3B yrs ago did dissolve in the sun.

It does look nicely organized and contained. But to your point: lithium production (and other cleantech) involves mining and industrial-scale processing. The good thing is that we need less mining and processing overall as we transition to clean energy.

If you don't open the straight, I'm going to close the straight.

Ok, I'll open it.

Oh no you don't!

Seruous "Battle of Alesia" energy....

(I had to look it up, but it was the battle of Alesia where the Romans were both surrounding and surrounded by the Gauls.)

Guys, this is getting increasingly confusing

Yes, agreed, though the two obstacles you mention are why I'm so enthusiastic. If exposure/experience is a main obstacle, it will be overcome quickly as adoption picks up. And the 2nd issue is one that less relevant over time. Both suggest that momentum should increase over time.

Historically, yes, though we are at the point where most cars are sold outside of the US/EU. So the transition doesn't require participation from either. And I believe that a) the US/EU companies are not strictly ignoring EVs and b) if an obviously better tech is available, consumers will demand it.

Hard to say what the ratios will be in the future, but I expect that non-toxic Sodium-based batteries will become increasingly common (there is already a production-model EV with these batteries) and that recycling will pick up once the battery waste stream picks up to a non-trivial level.

There isn't yet any problem, bc there are few EV batteries being disposed of (today's discarded batteries come from EVs sold ~10 yrs ago). But we will eventually have many batteries. We will end up doing some combination of recycling, landfilling, and switching to non-toxic chemistries.