Sidefx wrote:
diesel95 wrote:
Sidefx wrote:
GE Oil and Gas (now Baker Hughes).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GE_Oil_and_Gas#:~:text=GE%20Oil%20%26%20Gas%20was%20the,was%20merged%20with%20Baker%20Hughes.Thank you for all the extra detail but my original point is still valid, you asked me for sources and I've given them (even if you don't like the sources).
Fossil fuel companies (including companies like GE that have and are still suppliers to fossil fuel production and FF energy production) all still have their hands in there.
It doesn't matter if they are "green washing" (like GE is/has been doing) or not, they still have a large degree of control and profits in both markets (BlackRock and Vanguard are major players/influences).
And I'd go as far as saying so would some of the Chinese owned RE companies just like Iberdrola SA, it'd be a lot harder to track that though given the system they work under but at that level there would also be blurred lines.
For example, Tongwei (China's largest PV producer) factories are located in coal producing regions for cheap power, to think they or the chairman or other investors don't have any involvement with the surrounding coal powered energy production is a bit of a stretch for me.
I thought the biggest wind turbine suppliers in EU were Siemens, who also have and have had for a long time a large oil and gas division?
Personally I have no issue with Ampol sponsoring us, at least they are trying to rebrand and move towards cleaner energy production/use, even if you don't like it or trust them.
I have just as much issue with global emissions as I do with environmental damage from RE production and RE disposal and in this sector we are just robbing Peter to pay Paul IMO.
China is building and deploying RE faster than the rest of the world put together. last year Chinese wind power deployment was more than the rest of the world. not sure about PV but most of the worlds PV is made in china today (much of it using UNSW and ANU Patented technologies). but China are also building coal and gas. some of the new coal replaces much more dirty, existing coal power plants, but by all means not all of it.
the more they have RE in their grid where the PV is manufactured then the less embodied energy. a PV panel pays back the “embedded emissions” within approx 18 months if deployed in australia in full sun. they’re rated to ten years but todayS panels can last 30 years easy. may get to 40 yrs average life expectancy.
PV panels continue to produce power after the life expectancy has past but the rating is for 90% of their nameplate capacity. typically they deteriorate at 1.5% pa but some better panels are less than 0.5% pa today. perk cells will
mean lower material usage per kW of panel.
there are techniques to recycle 99% of PV panels today. we won’t always be extracting the silicon (or other for thin film PV) and mineral ores for the other elements required. at some point recycling will account for most or all of PV material demand.
coal is so much worse environmentally. mostly for the GHGs but also the water use, toxic air pollution.
fossil gas is worse than coal from a GHG perspective due to the methane emissions when we compare power from coal fired power and fossil gas open cycle gas turbines.
methane has cause 37% of the historical warming we have experienced to date.
oil and petrol are worse again from an emissions perspective. all combustion devices used to do mechanical work lose two thirds of the energy released as unuseful heat. so when we electrify we only need to replace a third of the energy being used in an ICE engine for example.
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I get that GHG's are worse from the FF sector, hence the push towards RE in the first place.
However, unlike CO2 emissions that can be converted by the environment (when it's not be destroyed for farming, population growth and now RE and its transmission) the materials used in PV panels and wind turbines have a longer lasting effect on the environment and is the reason for my comment.
Every RE enthusiast has the same mantra, both solar panels and wind turbines are 99% recyclable (which I doubt given the following).
1. PV panels have 10% plastic in them which they mainly burn off when recycling and allegedly reuse for heating.
2. PV panels on average weigh 19kgs so that is 1.9kg of plastic per panel.
3. It is not economically viable to recycle these panels so most countries don't and they just go to landfill.
4. Plastic can take up to 600 years to decompose.
5. Wind turbine blades are made of fibreglass and carbon fibre and are also not economical to recycle.
6. Wind turbine blades are being buried and from what I've read, fibreglass once buried will never decompose.
7. Lithium batteries are toxic, the processing is extremely toxic and uses extensive amounts of water.
8. Most lithium batteries are not recycled (10% in Aus in 2021) and when they are, they generate large amounts of harmful toxic emissions.
My issue is the media, politicians and activists are all focusing on GHG's when the silent killer is all the rubbish and plastics that we are disposing of, hence robbing Peter to pay Paul.
They estimate that the ocean surface is 40% (5.25 Trillion pieces) covered by plastics and you can not get fish (bigger than sardines) without microns of plastic in them.
Yet all the focus is on GHG which in my opinion will not be resolved before we see wide spread damage, not as a result of FF companies but as a result of human population booms and the land and food required to support them.
I agree with sinbagger, China is just playing the rest of the world as fools, they are controlling a narrative which best suits them while having little to no desire to move away from FF.
They require vast amounts of energy to grow and expand and now they are covering their land with PV panels, they will soon be looking west to obtain food for their ever increasing population, creating world shortages in their wake faster than global warming.
Everything has a price, but not everyone wants to look at it in its entirety.
And is why I am perplexed as to why both sides of our gvt is not looking into nuclear, it is the cleanest form of energy still and surely they have advanced the technology a little in the last 70 odd years. At minimum it seriously needs to be looked at, especially given we only contribute to 1.06% global GHGs.
Sorry from straying from the original topic, but that was my point.
As time goes by I feel the Pixar movie WALL-E is more and more a possibility, creating a planet full of rubbish.
Fact check: Methane is only 16% of GHGs (20-30% of total global warming since 1750) and 37% of that is from the agriculture sector.
1. plastics can be substituted, although as oil sales to land vehicles drops off cliff in the next two decades, oil and gas will fight like hell to maintain their small side market in plastics.
2. there are many types of PV panel today. some have glass others don’t, they have acrylic coverings. Thin film solar is on some kind of plastic film. these will all be recyclable as the recycling industry tools up. some plastics are down cycled admittedly, ie used for less valuable things. but guess what, plastic used for PV is as useful as any other use, including stents in someone’s artieries or blood bags in hospital. because with out it we’ll go to +5–8 °C by the end of the century and that’s lights out for civilisation as we know it. The AMOC is already showing signs of slowing down, it’s uncertain as to when it stops. Europe becomes like Iceland when that occurs. the Asian countries who rely on monsoon rainfall for Agriculture may lose their annual Monsoon rains, though Australian monsoon may become more intense.
3. who told you that? it’s just that nobody has bothered until recently to commercialise the 20 years of university research into Pv recycling. the metal elements are all valuable. the silicon substrate is a highly pure grade of silicon and refinement is energy intensive (and presently GHG intensive). there are PV recycling centres popping up on every continent. Australia has had at least one for a couple of years. there wasn’t much volume in old PV cells. now that householders and PV farms are upgrading their installations the volume will start to flow.
4. yes. plastics in the ocean are an ecological hazard and so many sea birds are dying because their guts are full of micro-beads of plastic that has broken down into beads in the ocean under UV but still doesn’t leave the birds gut or get dissolved. PV derived plastics are not the cause of this ocean plastic. it’s consumer item packaging, trillions of plastic bottles and everything else flowing out of rivers, especially in East Asia and South East Asia but everywhere also. and over half of the plastic in the ocean gyres is fishing équipement from commercial and domestic fishing boats. PV is not the place to stop this flow of waste. i worked on campaigns to bring SA style bottle deposits in to WA and it was a nightmare with the owners of Coke etc who bottle most of the drinks doing everything the whinny little bitches could to stack the parliament against it (and in WA parliament is owned by the gas and resources sector —both sides of parliament! — so they just had to call up their mates at woodside and Chevron)
5. & 6. ok we have all the smug shitposting climate change denier talking points here don’t we…
fine.
i’ll educate those following along at home. i don’t expect any deniers to believe any of this, when you ask them what evidence would change their mind, they usually say “nothing”!
the amount of waste from the entire historical waste product that is wind turbine blades is a minute fraction of one years fossil fuel industries waste streams. not to mention when they drown entire nations like Nigeria in crude and don’t even pay to (half) clean it up. you know US fishermen are still paid a living wage not to fish in the gulf of Mexico post-Deep-Horizon?
the good news is that a 100% recyclable turbine blade now exists. they’re highly resolved technical feats of engineering so it was no easy task to replace the fibre glass and carbon fibre with recyclable materials. i bet all those cars, motorbikes and truck manufactures haven’t given it the slightest thought as to making their products 100% recyclable.
7. lithium is toxic, so is anything in the right quantity! i have a friend who is bipolar and doesn’t like the medication and his prescribing doctor told him if he’s not going to take the medicine then at least get some lithium crystals and lick them every day. which he does sometimes when he’s sick of the meds.
lithium processing is extremely toxic? is it? half the worlds lithium comes from salt flats in WA at this moment in time. of all the resources pulled from WA i’d be comfortable saying it’s amongst the least ecologically impactful and least in downstream effluent outflows. heck even cattle farming up North is doing more damage to the Exmouth reefs than lithium mining is doing to rivers in the SW.
all resource extraction is catastrophic for the local environment, and if you are advocating for strategic degrowth or doughnut economics adoption then yes, let’s have that important conversation!!
but lithium extraction in WA, in spite of being half the worlds supply at present is fairly small footprint on the surface of the earth, compared to farmed animal production it’s basically half of nothing.
like all “rare earths” (they aren’t rare, in spite of assumptions people make given that name, but the ore bodies are very low concentration and often there’s many different elements in the same ore, requiring a lot more processing than other metals). the processing can have extremely toxic effluent streams if not management appropriately to avoid them entering the surrounding environment. i agree on that.
So guess what the multinational corporations based in Australia, USA and EU decided to do 30 years ago? they decided to outsource their environmental and labour law and regulation problems to China. these kinds of mineral ore bodies are shipped to (mostly) China for processing to circumnavigate our own environmental and labour regulations.
i bet you were on Swanston Street every week protesting that unjust outcome every week Side ex.
processing lithium uses excessive water? are you serious? do you know how much water the coal industry uses, or resources in general? lithium processing would be less than 0.001% of resource sector water consumption.
you probably don’t know this given the cliche list of potshots you’ve launched, but lithium ion batteries use small amounts of lithium and there’s a half a dozen other metals used much more (by weight) in the battery cells, casing, contacts, wires etc. there’s a bunch of different chemistries used in lithium ion batteries today, but other elements in use in one or more of these chemistries are nickel, copper, iron, silver, tin, manganese, aluminium, cobalt, phosphorus etc
lithium by weight is 1-7% of the composition of the battery seven or so main lithium chemistries, depending on each chemistry and manufacturing choices. Cobalt is a big concern, environmentally and ethically given the place and why it is extracted, efforts have been made to substitute Cobolt out of lithium batteries. tesla use several chemistries in their batteries and i think cobolt is out of most or all of them now. certainly much reduced in quantity if not completely absent.
then there is the transition to sodium chemistries. then there’s the prospect of organic chemistries. for balancing power grids, i expect by 2035 we will have begun to see the deployment of thermal batteries. they are less efficient, generally, than chemical batteries in round trip efficiency, but when the manufacturing cost is orders of magnitude cheaper, you can be 60 less effective and still be more cost effective. and energy density/specific density/volume/mass per MWh is less of a deal breaker for stationary energy applications. in fact its not a deal breaker at all, which is why Pumped Hydro is still being deployed on grids today. (France has a crap load of it to balance their baseload nuclear which cannot ramp to match the demand cycle fluctuations that occur each day, especially with PV on rooftops).
recycling of batteries, even when that battery swap for cars ideas was launched with billions of dollars (Shai Agassi, salesman extraordinaire) at Better Place (no more) the recyclability of lithium ion batteries was excellent.
when car and truck batteries don’t hold enough charge, they will be deployed to households and big batteries on the grid. when they no longer perform there they will be refurbished once, twice, maybe three times, then recycled. a “ten year” tesla battery in a car will have four more lives in the stationary world before being recycled. people are already getting better life from tesla Car and Household batteries than they are warranted for, even very heavy use scenarios.
i’ll deal with the “China is taking the piss” comments (ignoring the implicit racism) another day. so to the ecological collapse considerations vs Climate Change considerations. the two are orthogonal in one sense but very intertwined in causes and effects. as a Masters student in Economics of Sustainability the interdependence of these issues is something i’m aware of on many levels, and have given considerable reading, both theory and data, thought and discussion too.
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