[sendler]

Originally Posted by Cephalotus post_id=1501919 time=1570304833 user_id=27450

Nonsense.

Taking Germany as an example.

If you electrify all sectors and depending where we get gases and liquid fuels for ships, planes, gas peakers & Co (some import is an option) we need to produce maybe around 1000TWh/a of electricity in Germany.

This could be 700TWh wind power and 300TWh solar and for simpla caclulation this translates to 200GW wind power and 300GW Solar power over here

If average lifetime of a wind power plant is 20 years and for a solar power plant it is 30 years you need to build 10GW of each for each year.

so far we built 7-8GW each in our best years. 10GW is not far of.

Battery capacity should be around 200GW / 500GWh, add 100GW gas peakers and 100GW electrolyseurs

CATL is now building a 100GWh cell/battery factory in Germany. It is for electric cars, but as you see, this amount isn' problematic either.

We just need to do it.

Much easier (and cheaper) than building new nukes

You are an expert on Germany. But you keep forgetting that Germany is only .08 billion people out of 8 billion. Germany did not produce those 7GW per year of new wind and solar capacity all by itself for those few years that it was at that level. How much of the world's total solar and wind raw materials and manufacturing capacity did that represent? You were 20% short of your modest goal of 1000TWh/ year in 30 years, so for the world to achieve your per capita energy wealth and make the goal of having it done in 30 years, so that the first ones can start to be rebuilt in 30 years perpetually, world installation of wind and solar would have to increase 120X beyond what you did for a couple years at the peak.
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1000TWh/ year of rebuildable electricity is a lofty goal and will be much better than nothing but is realistically a little low in order to replace what Germany is currently using for Primary energy. Currently almost 14,000 PetaJoules which is 3,900 TWh/ year. Many industrial heat processes that now use thermal gas or coal, such as cement and steel, which will be needed in huge quantities for wind installs, will not see any efficiency gain from switching to electric. So estimates of efficiency improvements from full electrification of human civilization are closer to 2:1. Leaving 1,500 TWh/ year for Germany. 70,000 TWh/ year for the World! would be less than half of the total primary energy we are now using. And 3 billion people still cook and heat with wood as their only means.
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And then there is the question of retrofitting or replacing all built out machinery and infrastructure that uses carbon fuels world wide.
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Along with battery production. When GigaFactory 1 was announced, it was stated to at once double the world's capacity of production. With .035 TWh/ year. Has it ever had a year that matched it's stated capacity yet? World capacity is now stated to be about .4 TWh/y. Projected to be 1TWh/y by 2025. Just to replace the worlds 1.3 billion current gas/ diesel light vehicles, to say nothing of farm tractors and heavy trucks, with electric cars with 60 kWh batteries, requires 80 TWh of batteries! Just for cars and light trucks! And most people in the world do not even have one yet, but want one. And we talk of a proposed addition of another .1 TWh GigaFactory like it is a big deal.
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I'm not studying all of this, and saying all of this to be negative. I am being pragmatic given the real data. To save the future as best as possible as we face down the approaching bottlenecks of debt reconciliation, Energy/nonrenewable resource/ water/ fertile soil/ ect depletion, and mass migration/ mass extinction.
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Greta gives us a new buzz word in the media. Fairy tales. We have fairy tales by under informed economists and politicians of eternal exponential growth on a finite planet. And just as inaccurate, fairy tales of a possible Green replacement to the same standard that we have now. While (forgetting) uplifting the exploited Global South. Many of our demands are untenable. Net zero in 12 years? Extinction Rebellion demands that it be so within 5 years. This will certainly precipitate the collapse that they claim to be fighting against. Be pragmatic. Maybe it is better to slide down now under control to a simpler more cooperative way of life, rather than to keep growing to an inevitable higher, steeper "Seneca Cliff".
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Many of our ideas will turn out to be wasted moves. Such as individual families living in "green" McMansions. Such as executives earning 500 times the amount as the base employee. Such as mail ordering whatever frivolous "green" gadget "the market" has advertised (brain washed) us to want, before throwing it away to lust after the next thing. Such as "green" 60kWh personal vehicles for each of the eventual 10 billion people on Earth.