Scientists invented fabric that makes
electricity from motion and sunlight.
To create the fabric, researchers at
Georgia Tech wove together solar
cell fibers with materials that generate
power from movement. It could be
used in “tents, curtains, or wearable
garments,” meaning we’d virtually
never be without power. Source
Y’all are fucking idiots. Clean energy will NEVER be enough to replace the energy we have now. We’d have to tear down DOZENS of forests just to fit enough windmills and solar panels to get even a QUARTER (probably less, tbh) of the energy we can produce now.
Yeah, sure, when they’ve already calculated that a few square miles of panels in the empty ass Arizona desert could power the whole nation. But ok, fracking and the diminishing petroleum supply is worlds better.
Nevermind that windmills are often most efficient off the coast. There they take up no land, impact no trees, don’t pollute the water, and are conveniently located where winds are often strongest anyway.
And solar panels can literally be built into roofs of buildings and in empty areas like deserts. The sun strikes the Earth with the same amount of energy in an hour that our civilization uses in a year.
But yeah, it would be impossible for us to ever have enough energy from clean sources.
Durr hurr technology is bad and I would rather light shit on fire than have clean energy
I can also testify to the Arizona desert being empty ass. And the California desert. And the Nevada desert.
The fact that anyone can believe a limited amount of dinosaur oil is more plentiful and efficient than moving air or fucking sunlight is proof that entire populations can be completely brainwashed.
As someone who lives in coal and oil country, has a brother who works in a natural gas plant, and has paid attention to such things from a variety of knowledgeable, reliable sources, I have some nuance to add to the discussion. There is still a piece not quite in place, at least in the US, that will be needed before we can switch to all renewables, and that is POWER STORAGE. I.e. batteries.
The way the current grid is set up, power is produced and consumed simultaneously. It’s never stored, just sent out over the wires to be used. This works great when you have a steady source of power forming the basis of the grid. The problem is that it has to be balanced: too much power and too little usage, and you damage equipment, too little power for the demand and you have brownouts. The higher percentage of your energy comes from renewables, the less well the current grid works, because renewables are by their nature hard to balance. Because the sun doesn’t shine all the time, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time. So either you need to have a massive power grid sharing power over huge swathes of the globe (so that even if it’s not shining where you are, it’s shining SOMEWHERE) or you need to store the power from the day/windy times for the dark/still times. Or you need power plants that you can turn off during the day and on at night (which coal plants can’t do, but natural gas plants can).
California’s power grid is a perfect example. They have lots of solar production! Huge amounts of it! They have way more power than they can use during the day, and sell it across the nation. (People use less power during the day than at night, by the way. Fewer lights are on during the day, and people tend to be congregated in schools and office buildings and factories and the like where the lighting and HVAC are industrial and thus more efficient per person, as all high-population-density things tend to be.) Then people go home. They turn on lights and TVs and all sorts of things, and power use rises as the sun sets and solar power production goes down. As solar production has increased over the years, headaches for all energy companies have increased, not merely because they are heavily invested in the rotted dinosaur method of energy production, but simply because it is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY harder to balance our consumption/production with renewables on our current power grid than it is to just do it the old climate-destroying way.
Yeah, of course Denmark has a power surplus–a HUGE power surplus–sometimes. All renewables do. The question is, how often do they have power deficits? And how do they handle power storage for the times when the wind isn’t blowing? I don’t know if their solutions would work for the US, given that they have 5.7 million people and the US has 326.7 million people and it might not scale up enough, but it’s a place to start.
Ironically, developing nations that don’t have existing power grids are having a much easier time of going green than big industrialized nations. If you already have a grid right near your house/shop, it is cheaper to connect to the grid than to put in solar panels and a battery system. If, however, you don’t have an existing power grid, solar panels and a battery become much cheaper.
The problem is, while we have batteries capable of storing overnight power needs for a house (or even a whole village or small town), we don’t currently have batteries efficient/effective enough to handle the whole American power grid. It can be done, but hasn’t been worked out yet. So what happens these days, is that we have regulations requiring energy companies to use/purchase “green” power from renewables whenever it is available. But it’s not always available because the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine. So they have to use traditional power plants for that. Since you can’t ramp a coal-powered plant up and down quickly, they are being shut down and run less intensely, but they’ve been increasing the use of natural gas power plants, which can be ramped up and down very quickly to meet demand. (Note that natural gas plants produce cleaner emissions than coal plants, so this is a good thing, by the way.)
All this is not to say that renewables are bad and impractical–the issues I’ve listed should not be hard to solve, in the grand scheme of things–but rather to give you a bit more depth so that when you are trying to convince the rotting dinosaur believers that there are better options than burning rotted dinosaurs, you have an idea of what types of serious objections there are (not just “we’d have to cut down forests,” yegads) so you can address them.
(BTW, the currently most popular form of wind turbine–the tower with three blades–is HELLACIOUSLY bad for birds. They create wind vortexes around them–particularly if you have a wind farm with lots of turbines near one another–that sucks birds in to the blades and kills them. However, there are such a thing as bladeless turbines, and while they are not quite as efficient they are also less likely to kill entire flocks of birds at once.)
Basically this could all be solved if there was enough will exerted by the people of the US to force our government to do it. As with so many other things.
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