This is part of why reducing our total energy usage is as important if not more important than just removing carbon from energy production. Every energy source has some kind of impact, some more than others. We should strive to make the least impactful energy we can and respect that energy by being effecient with it.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2024
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This always confuses me as to why we are still using energy usage busywork like AI and blockchain right now. Even if we get 100% renewable we still need to be efficient to reduce impact on our world, and put that into other important things. And we are definitely not in a position to be wasting away energy right now.
Techbros don't care.
Vulture capitalists don't care.
Line must go up.
No exceptions.
Most home energy use is heating and cooling. Heating air, water, and clothes drying. Cooling for refrigeration and air.
But home energy is a small portion of per capita energy. Transportation of goods (buy local), manufacturing of goods (bricks, steel, ceramics, concrete, aluminum, and glass are all kiln fired), etc. Consumers do not have information about energy of goods other than price. And many price-based decisions are worse for the environment - like buying plastic containers every few years vs. glass ones that last decades.
As energy becomes less expensive, its usage will naturally increase. A huge portion of the world doesn’t have indoor climate control or hot water on tap. Anyway energy usage is determined by demand, and demand is currently limited by price. Lower price will bring higher demand for the foreseeable future.
Realistically, it's not gonna happen.
Energy usage is going to increase (quite a lot, if you ask me) in the future due to low-cost solar power. But also, I have to say, that's a good thing. Solar power has almost no environmental impact at all, and if you can't cherish that, but still doom into depression, then I would recommend reconsidering your lifestyle and maybe talk to a therapist.
The solar panels in my area are often in empty fields that could have been forests, farms, or houses with panels on the roofs. The panels still contain minerals mined from the earth, which has an impact. Broken panels will still have to be disposed of safely and ideally recycled, either way creating an impact.
If we let the rules of captialism continue to control our mindset of course we will continue to use more and more energy, just like companies expect more and more growth and profits.
Solar panels consist mostly of Silicon, which is the most abundant material in earth's crust. There's really no "mineral" whose mining causes fewer problems. And i put "mineral" in quotes because it's not your typical mineral that you have to dig up to use.
Also, solar panels are entirely non-toxic, making their safe disposal a non-problem.
My God, they cut down forests, destroyed farms, and tore down houses to build those solar panels?! Or were the empty fields they were in just empty beforehand? So despite that land being put to good use, you're upset because.... What?
The more important question however, is if the short term loss in biodiversity is offset by the long term gain in both biodiversity and all the other benefits that come with not burning more coal and natural gas.
They highlight south america as an area that is seeing the largest declines and which is highly dependent on hydro power, but the only other options that area has are either to cut down the rainforest for solar, tie the entire national grid to a few offshore wind farms, pump a massive portion of their limited GDP into a rich western nation and go into dept for a nuclear program, or most likely to actually happen, build lots of new natural gas plants and buy fuel from all those new LNG exports terminals the US just built. Given a hydro reservoir is also the cheapest way to bulk store renewables for night/calm days, it actually ends up being a double cut to renewables generation as a whole.
Talior made fish ladders plus effective reserch and monitoring obviously helps eliminate most of the barriers created by a dam, but are an additional cost with little direct benefit to the local community and as such tend to be the first to go when people start to ask why the government has money to study some fish’s comfort but not for the town to get drinkable tap water or subsidize small AC units so the poor don’t die in the next climate change induced heat wave. Also harder to get the IMF to let your nation go into debt for.
Obviously every method generating electricity is going to have its sacrifices, unless you are like Australia and most of your country is desert with large lithium reserves, but I feel like this sort of conversion is best served by ‘and that’s why the West should be giving poor countries tailor made fish ladders to preserve our shared climate’ and not ‘and that’s why we can’t let poor nations build the same dams the rich countries used to build their industry and provide rural electrification a century ago. Indeed we need to go farther and replace these new dams with a vauge something(Hint: that vague something is fossil fuels).’
It is worth keeping in mind that lot of migratory fish are not expected to be able to survive the warmer rivers of the next few decades or will be right on the edge, so 2C vs 2.2C vs 2.4 is probably going to be the deciding factor and as such the oil and gas prices pants those dams took offline do matter.
Electricity is also only one of the three main reasons you build dams, with the other primary one in the rainforest being flood control. People tend to live near water, and when that water rises because of a climate change induced storm it tends to be bad for the people.
Also, while I’m certain the actual study accounts for it, the article uses loss of freshwater fish populations as a whole without acknowledging that a significant factor of that is climate change making rivers warmer, and that warmer water stresses fish, so it comes across as pretty disingenuous.
Water is a living space. It harbors all kinds of life. It's not good that we try to industrialize rivers. Not good at all. We should use only wind and solar as renewable energy sources. And batteries for storage.
You gotta have reliable baseload energy. Traditionally, that has been hydro in blessed regions, coal and gas in other regions, and nuclear if your country has the funds to do so.
The key is to always have baseload power for dark winter months, weeks of bad weather, or heat domes and forest fires, where you may find yourself not having sun or wind for extended periods of time with incredibly high demand on the grid (for AC!).
My two cents is that nuclear energy is worth it for clean, reliable energy that doesn't hose all of your rivers. We will need some hydro for water reserves and power, but a diverse energy mix that doesn't rely on hydrocarbons is the way forward, imo.
Baseload of hydro, nuclear, geothermal. Solar and wind with battery storage, pumped storage, green hydrogen. Rooftop solar. Greenscapes in cities to keep heat down and absorb rainwater so it doesn't mess up combined sewage pipes.
Heat pumps and proper insulation for homes and buildings. Ebikes for short range commutes of 1-45 miles. Puts a lot less strain on the grid than EV cars, too.
Combined sewer pipes really all should be replaced at this point. Stormwater and waste water require significantly different treatment processes.
We need hydro power with renewables, even more than we need it with fossil fuels. Hydro allows us to store eenrgy (through pumping water back into the lake as potential energy), which is required when peak usage hours don't match peak production hours. Since we can't control when solar or wind will produce power, energy storage is even more of a necessity for those sources than it is for fossil sources.
Maybe a dumb question but would hydro on top of a large waterfall work without impacting biodiversity? I ask because maybe there isn’t wildlife that goes down large waterfalls, so no impact.
I think we should harness the power of rivers, but we need to learn to do in a non disruptive way. Dams are terrible, we should definitely find better way to harness the power of waterways.
I don't really think it is especially in comparison to petrochemicals, but hydroelectric dams also isn't my favorite green energy. They displace too much matter while also reducing the wildlife of the project area for me to feel comfortable with it. I think perhaps there's further ways water could be used to make electricity that are underestimated or even unknown. I like "old-school" hydroelectrics, watermills. In my opinion this is an example really of individualistic green energy being a better environmental decision on the whole. Such will reduce the damage of our energy needs. Power to the people.
Hydro isn't only a source of energy, it's also the most efficient way to store energy. With solar and wind, peak usage hours don't match peak production hours, so we need storage capacity to be even able to use solar & wind. And dams are the absolute best we have for that storage purpose, in terms of cost, efficiency, and environmental impact
I agree it provides a more regular "stream" of energy. I think perhaps this focus on having regular unlimited energy at all times of night and day is a little unnecessary. People do sleep, and they should sleep during the night for maximum health, based on research. I find energy storage an important aspect of sustainability. We should have storage regardless of the system. I'm not against using it, all I said was it's not my favorite.
I think the best aspect about these dams is that they are already there. We don't need to do massive investments in our infrastructure to built giant batteries, since water power is already there and can be easily modified to act as storage additionally.
I just said in another comment that I think there's other ways to harness the power of water that we're unaware of. I think dams are an easy go to and the reality is that they are a nuisance. Hopefully we can make some breakthroughs. Especially now we've started making strides in wave power.
I get where you're coming from. It's a tandem tech and should stay in that consideration. It's a diversity of tactics in the fight against petrochems. That industry is too big for just one avenue, at least of the ones we currently have.