[Yoric]

I agree with most of your points.

Please research solar and wind before switching, though. Until we have solved the problem of energy storage, in many cases, solar and wind actually tend to increase pollution, because they both rely upon polluting raw materials for both themselves and their batteries and need backup power, which to this day means gas.

That is unless you find yourself with a good problem set in which e.g. you only need energy while the sun is out (AC in the summer, maybe, or perhaps warming up water for your early evening shower?) or while there is wind (no example from the top of my head, but I'm sure there are good ones).

[svnt]

This argument is total oil company propaganda. Raw materials do not pollute. Their mining and manufacture does, but that again is because of oil consumption in an outdated manufacturing chain. Burning oil produces CO2. It is chemically impossible to avoid this. Manufacturing silicon and harvesting lithium do not produce CO2, and these processes can be cleaned up.

[sokoloff]

Concrete production requires CO2 from energy but also releases CO2 from the chemical processes. (Concrete is heavily used in wind energy production systems.)

[ByteJockey]

You seem to be using "pollute" as a synonym for "releasing CO2", while Yoric does not.

I think the two of you are talking past each other.

[DwnVoteHoneyPot]

So you are agreeing with Yoric then? Doubling up in energy infrastructure increases mining and manufacturing, which then increases pollution. But then you say it's propaganda?

[drusenko]

Can you tell me more about why you are equating the mining of metals for solar/batteries with climate changing GHGs - eg why are they both equally as bad? I’m not disagreeing with you, I am genuinely curious to hear your perspective.

I do generally agree with you on your second point that it might not be the most productive action to take - for the time being it would probably be better for most people to focus on electrifying their homes paired with switching over to 100% clean energy (many utilities allow you to choose this option).

[KennyBlanken]

> Until we have solved the problem of energy storage

We have. Pumped hydro and batteries (iron flow is successfully being deployed commercially, but also lithium ion; Li-Ion prices continue to drop 6-12% per year.)

> because they both rely upon polluting raw materials for both themselves and their batteries and need backup power, which to this day means gas.

No.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...

> To pick a much tougher case, the “dark doldrums” of European winters are often claimed to need many months of battery storage for an all-renewable electrical grid. Yet top German and Belgian grid operators find Europe would need only one to two weeks of renewably derived backup fuel, providing just 6 percent of winter output — not a huge challenge.

> The bottom line is simple. Electrical grids can deal with much larger fractions of renewable energy at zero or modest cost, and this has been known for quite a while. Some European countries with little or no hydropower already get about half to three-fourths of their electricity from renewables with grid reliability better than in the U.S. It is time to get past the myths.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2012/sep/26/myt...

> The essence of the wind sceptics' case is that a scaling up in wind power will have to be "backed up" by massive investment in gas-fired open cycle turbine (OCGT) plants, which are cheap to build but considerably less efficient than the combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) power plants which deliver the vast majority of the UK's gas-fired electricity supply.

> Their arguments are not borne out by current statistics, however. If the sceptics were right, the recent windy conditions would have seen considerable use of less-efficient OCGT as wind input to the grid ramped up and down. In actual fact, during the entire June-September period, OCGTs and equally dirty oil-fired stations produced less than one hundredth of one percent of all UK electricity. In total they operated for a grand total of just nine half hour periods in the first 19 days of the month – and these periods had nothing to do with changing windspeeds.

Further references:

https://usa.oceana.org/renewable-energy-myth-vs-fact/

https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy05osti/37657.pdf

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