Re:France approves 720MW of solar as price falls another 5%
by realreality on Monday August 20, 2018 @01:28PM
(#17801881)
Regarding 2° being a catastrophe — that’s how James Hanson described it. The Paris Agreement picked 2° as some kind of politically attainable goal. It’s not a safe limit for human civilization as we know it.
> No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies
I said that it currently requires fossil fuels. In order to build “renewable energy” systems, you need to bootstrap it by expending fossil fuels today. Even if you could somehow mine iron ore with electric bulldozers, that’s not currently how iron is mined (and transported, refined, etc). So, you have to convert every link in the supply chain. Some people have already calculated that, in order to completely convert our electricity system to 100% renewable, we’d have to burn more fossil fuels today than would be allowable under the carbon budget outlined in the Paris agreement. Others have calculated that the transition will simply take too long (and the rate it has to happen increases all the time).
Can you outline how it’s possible to convert our industrial system to 100% renewable energy, using real numbers and timelines? Does your model also include economic growth (and therefore growth in energy consumption)?
There’s also this recent paper which got a lot of press http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/07/31/1810141115
> No it doesn't. We can convert 100% of our energy usage to renewable energies
I said that it currently requires fossil fuels. In order to build “renewable energy” systems, you need to bootstrap it by expending fossil fuels today. Even if you could somehow mine iron ore with electric bulldozers, that’s not currently how iron is mined (and transported, refined, etc). So, you have to convert every link in the supply chain. Some people have already calculated that, in order to completely convert our electricity system to 100% renewable, we’d have to burn more fossil fuels today than would be allowable under the carbon budget outlined in the Paris agreement. Others have calculated that the transition will simply take too long (and the rate it has to happen increases all the time).
Can you outline how it’s possible to convert our industrial system to 100% renewable energy, using real numbers and timelines? Does your model also include economic growth (and therefore growth in energy consumption)?