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Restoring nature is our only climate solution (www.resilience.org)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/climate@slrpnk.net
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A review of available techno-fixes leads to two unavoidable conclusions. First, our problem is not just carbon emissions per se; it’s also how we humans inhabit our planet (too many of us using too much stuff too fast). And second, we need non-technological ways of addressing the climate crisis.

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[–] 4 points 1 day ago (6 children)

This article makes a lot of good points, but

Wind and solar power are intermittent, requiring energy storage (e.g., batteries) and a major grid overhaul. Building these energy sources at sufficient scale to replace our current energy usage from fossil fuels would require enormous amounts of materials, some of them rare, and mining those materials destroys habitat and pollutes the environment.

It's obvious the author isn't very educated on renewable energy.

Energy storage isn't batteries. Renewable energy storage is hydroelectric dams. Solar and wind during the day, and hydroelectric dams operate only at night. If your hydro is running during the day, you've done fucked up and need batteries

Do it right, and no batteries are needed, which drastically alters the rare earth materials needed.

But, yeah, we do also need to reduce our energy usage and our population too.

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  • [–] [S] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

    Energy storage isn’t batteries. Renewable energy storage is hydroelectric dams.

    Batteries are energy storage. Dams tend to be extremely damaging to river ecosystems.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    We can't really expand on hydroelectric dams; we already have dams in just about all locations where they make sense. If there's no convenient hydro dam near you you're probably going to have to go with something else for storage.

    Also, those dams are usually used for power generation; for storage it's more common to use pumped hydro where you store energy by pumping water to a higher reservoir and release it by letting it flow to a lower one. A major downside is that pumped hydro only works in select locations; not every hill is suitable for installing a pair of large cisterns.

    Another option is compressed air energy storage, which stores energy by compressing lots of air in large tanks and then releases it by letting the air back out. Cleverly designed implementations can even make use of the thermal changes the air undergoes at its density changes. They also need specific local conditions; huge high pressure tanks are hard to build so we usually use things like salt caverns as tanks. One interesting option is to use depleted natural gas fields.

    There's also other options like flywheels, which should be a bit less picky about location.

    And lastly, not every battery needs lots of rare earth metals. Sodium batteries are currently starting to hit the market; they are more stable and less reliant on rare materials than lithium batteries. They are also bulkier but that's not much of a concern for a grid-level storage facility.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 day ago (1 child)

    You missed my point. If the dams are running during the day, you done fucked up.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    Why? Plenty of dams are perfectly capable of producing power 24/7. It may not even be possible to let the reservoir fill up during the day and drain it during the night, especially during a drought or flood period where the amount of incoming water very much dictates what you do with your dam and when.

    You make a lot of assumptions about how dams are operated. Those assumptions aren't always true.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    energy storage (e.g., batteries)

    Energy storage isn't batteries.

    The phrase "e.g." means "for example" and is used to describe a subset of the previous term. It doesn't need to mean the exact same thing.

    We can say things like "humans consume resources (e.g., fresh water)" and that would be a valid sentence.

    Plus it's fair to expect that in the next 10 years, the vast majority of grid scale energy storage worldwide is going to be electrical batteries. Gravity storage just can't compete except in very limited geographical and geological circumstances.

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