It will certainly become more fine so long as the grid is transitioning to renewable energy sources which almost all countries are doing. In the next decade the intensity of CO2e for electrical energy usage should be considerably lower than it is now and CO2e from necessary fuel usage will begin to dominate in industrial processes. Iron I think will be a big contributor to this since at the moment electrical production is not viable.

China the largest producer of iron and steel has started restricting coal based for electric arc based furnaces for steel making so iron and coal carbon use will probably come down as well.

https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/turning-point-chin...

Its just going to take a bit longer for Iron and steel production to transition, they likely wont bother until we see the full reduction in electrical price that comes with renewables. They do seem to have a process it just needs some refinement. The main grid transition is happening first and faster.

This is part of the issue with Seagate's assessment, its changing rapidly right now and in 5 years time Taiwan will be on mostly renewable energy and suddenly all of Seagate's iron usage will make them more expensive, then in 10 years time they are using electrically produced iron and its not an issue anymore.

If you are part of a large grid, power is fairly fungible (within that grid).

Nope.

Again look at Spain, not all power sources are equal and just because it's been connected to a network doesn't magically mean all of the load is then spread between all sinks.

If your high school science teacher told you so, they were wrong. It's time to talk about proper grown up electronics in this discussion.

I was including the weasel world 'fairly' in front of 'fungible' exactly because I foresaw such a discussion.

To be slightly more precise and wordy in what I wanted to express:

The original comment said:

> Not all energy is carbon intensive. Using a lot of power is fine as long as you get the power in a sustainable way.

And that's true. You can buy 'green electricity' from the grid. But that mostly just means that the people who don't care get allocated a larger fraction of 'non-green' electricity.

(That works, until you lose enough of that buffer of people who don't care where they electricity is coming from, that you have more demand for green electricity than is available on the grid. Then you actually need to spin up more green electricity or raise prices for that 'colour'.)

Yes, there's different demand levels over time (throughout the day, and throughout the year etc), and different demanders need different reliability levels. And all the power sources have different profiles for when they are available, and how easy (or hard or impossible) it is to turn them on or off on short notice.

> If your high school science teacher told you so, they were wrong. It's time to talk about proper grown up electronics in this discussion.

Haha, right.

The “time to talk about grown up…” is a bit much.

No, electronics at scale isn't the same as a 9v and filament bulb. There's real effects which aren't overly observable in a small setup that need to be addressed.

It's like pretending all of compiling is a direct translation to a lower language all the way down. It's not you make changes, adapt and optimise for the language and system you're in not just write Fortran in assembly

The "not all" argument is very lazy of you. All these production plants are on the grid and they use carbon energy. How much is "not all" ?

Absolutely not.

The poster has highlighted a major issue that is often glossed over in terms of actual carbon footprint. It's like saying a Chinese coal plant is the same as a Scottish hydro dam otherwise which is very, very wrong.

Yes nothing is perfect, but running a dam in an area with little water silt for many many years is different in carbon footprint to a coal plant run at 80% efficiency from strip mined coal.

Agree if that power is truly sustainable.

OTOH, if you have solar panels and drive power to the grid, you can sell "credits" to large power users who will use them to "offset" their less-green power sources to appear to get their power in sustainable ways / be carbon-neutral. Kind of an "I'm using dirtier power, but I teamed up with someone who's using fully sustainable power, so it all comes out in the wash!"